Once Upon The River Love

8

It was the shark that saved me…

I think if the film had begun differently I would have run out of the cinema and thrown myself under the wheels of the first truck that came by. In the deafening uproar of that brutal engine I would have sought out the blissful silence of the cedar tree…

The film could so easily have begun with a shot of a woman walking through the streets while the credits roll – a woman "walking to meet her destiny." Or with one of a man at the wheel of his car, his impassive face hypnotizing the bemused spectators. Or even with a scenic panorama… But it was a shark.

Well, first we saw a man with a shifty face and a shabby light suit. A man trying to call someone from a telephone booth on the sunny promenade of a southern town. He kept glancing around anxiously, cupping his hand over the mouthpiece. He did not have much time. A helicopter appeared in the azure sky… The machine stopped above the phone booth, lowered enormous claws, picked up the booth, and carried it off into the sky. Inside it the wretched spy was shaking the receiver, trying to pass on his ultrasecret message… But the monstrous claws were already opening. The booth fell, plummeted into the sea, landed on the bottom, and there two frogmen secured it very adroitly to a long cage. Using up his last few mouthfuls of air, the spy turned toward the door of the cage… He even managed to draw his pistol and fire. And produced a ridiculous stream of bubbles…

A splendid shark, which was, we guessed, ravenously hungry, darted into the submerged booth, pointing its snout at the spy's stomach. The water turned red…

A few moments later Belmondo made his appearance. And the man who was evidently his boss was telling him about his colleague's tragic end. "We succeeded in recovering his remains," he said in very solemn tones. And he showed him a can of… shark's fin soup!

It was too silly! Gloriously silly! Completely improbable! Wonderfully crazy!

We had no words to express it. We simply had to accept it and experience it for what it was. Like an existence parallel to our own.

The feature film had been preceded by a newsreel. The three of us were sitting in the front row – the least popular of all, but there were no other seats left when we got there. The voice-over, both ingratiating and hectoring, was pouring out its commentary on the political events of the day. First we saw the imperial splendor of some hall in the Kremlin, where an old man in a dark suit was pinning a medal to the chest of another old man. "In recognition of the merits of Comrade Gromygin toward the fatherland and the people, and his contribution to the cause of international détente, and on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday," declaimed the voice-over in ringing tones. And the assembled dark suits began to applaud.

Next appeared a woman in a little polka-dot satin dress who was moving at an incredible speed amid hundreds of bobbins, all turning at maximum velocity. She broke off from her work for a moment just to declare in strident tones: "I'm currently operating a hundred and twenty looms. But to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of our beloved Party, I solemnly resolve to transfer to a hundred and fifty looms." And once again we saw her nimble fingers dancing between the threads and bobbins. Indeed, she now seemed to me to be running from one loom to the next faster than ever, as if she were already preparing to break the record…

The lights came on again before being switched off for the feature film. Samurai nudged me with his elbow and offered me a handful of roasted sunflower seeds. I gripped them in my palm, while remaining in an opaque, all-enveloping torpor. She's going to operate a hundred and fifty looms, I was thinking. Then maybe a hundred and eighty. I sensed that this record-breaking weaver and the splendors of the Kremlin were mysteriously connected both to our dark district center and to the Transsiberian, with that red-haired woman forever waiting for it… I also knew that as soon as the darkness returned I would fling my seeds to the ground and escape to that road shaken by the passage of giant trucks. Yes, from the moment of those opening scenes, there would be a woman walking to meet her destiny – or a man at the steering wheel of his car…

But it was the shark! The absurdity of the can of fish soup containing the digested mortal remains of the spy was probably the only means by which I could have been kept on the fragile shores of life. Yes, what was needed was precisely that degree of harebrained madness for me to be snatched from reality and catapulted onto that sunny promenade, into that sunken cage where the mind-blowing execution was being prepared. The secret agent devoured by a shark and ending up in a can offish soup was just what was needed.

And there were also women on that promenade. Above all, those two who for several seconds hid the telephone booth with their miniskirted silhouettes, their indolent bodies, their suntanned legs.

Oh, those divine legs! They moved around on the screen, in time with the sensual, swaying gait of those two shapely young creatures. Tanned thighs that seemed not to have the least idea of the presence, somewhere in the world, of winter, of Nerlug, of our Siberia. Or of the camp whose barbed-wire entanglements had ensnared the sun pendulum. These legs demonstrated with extreme persuasiveness – though without seeking to convert anyone at all – the possibility of an existence without the Kremlin, without weaving looms and other achievements of socialist emulation. Magnificently apolitical thighs. Serenely amoral. Thighs outside History. Apart from all ideology. Without any utilitarian ulterior motive. Thighs for thighs' sake. Quite simply beautiful tanned women's legs!

The shark and the apolitical thighs prepared the way for the appearance of our hero.

He came in many guises, like some Hindu divinity in its infinite incarnations. Now at the wheel of an endless white automobile hurtling into the sea, now making waves in a swimming pool with powerful butterfly strokes, attracting lustful looks from bathing beauties. He demolished his enemies in a thousand ways, fought his way out of the nets they flung over him, rescued his companions in arms. But above all, he seduced unremittingly.

Enthralled, I melted into the multicolored cloud of the screen. So, the woman was not unique!

With unconscious force, I was still gripping the fistful of sunflower seeds. They had become hot, and the blood throbbed in my clenched fist. As if it were my heart I was holding in my hand, so that it should not explode from too much emotion.

It was quite a different heart. Henceforth there was nothing final about the tragic night it had lived through. The red-haired woman's izba was being swiftly transformed, before my very eyes, into just an episode, an experience, one amorous adventure (the first) among many. Under cover of the darkness I turned my head slightly and, furtively, examined Samurai's and Utkin's profiles. This time I was observing them with a discreet and indulgent smile. With an air of worldly superiority. I felt so much closer to Belmondo than the two of them were, so much better informed about the secrets of feminine sensuality!

And on the screen, in a highly acrobatic but elegant manner, our hero was toppling a superb female spy, in an amorous clinch, onto some piece of furniture that looked quite unsuitable for love… And the tropical night drew a conniving veil over their entwined bodies…

With half-closed eyes, I inhaled deeply exotic scents that tickled the nostrils and made the eyes go misty.

I was saved.

On the whole, we understood little of the universe of Belmondo at the time of that first showing. I do not believe all the plot twists of this farcical parody of spy films could have been accessible to us. Nor the constant shuttling back and forth between the hero, a writer of adventure novels, and his double, the invincible secret agent, thanks to whom the novelist sublimates the miseries and frustrations of his personal life.

We had not grasped this rather obvious device at all. But we perceived the essential: the surprising freedom of this multiple world, where people seemed to escape those implacable laws that ruled our own lives, from the humblest workers' canteen to the imperial hall of the Kremlin, not forgetting the silhouettes of the watchtowers fixed over the camp.

Of course, these extraordinary people had their sufferings and their setbacks too. But the sufferings were not without remedy, and the setbacks stimulated fresh boldness. Their whole lives became an exuberant overreaching of themselves. Muscles were tensed and broke chains, the steely look rebuffed the aggressor; bullets were always delayed for a moment as they nailed the shadows of these leaping beings to the ground.

And Belmondo-the-novelist took this combative freedom to its symbolic apogee: the secret agent's car missed a turn and fell from a clifftop; but the unbridled imagination retrieved it at once by making it go into reverse. In this universe even the step over the brink was not terminal.

Generally the crowd of spectators dispersed quickly after evening performances. They would be in a hurry to dive into a dark alley, go home, get into bed.

This time it was quite different. People emerged slowly, at a sleepwalker's pace, a faint smile on their lips. Spilling out onto a little patch of waste ground behind the cinema, they spent a moment marking time, blinded, deafened. Intoxicated. They exchanged smiles. Strangers paired off, formed unaccustomed, fleeting circles, as in a very slow, agreeably irregular dance. And the stars in the milder sky seemed larger, closer.

It was under this light, less cold than before, that we walked along those little twisting alleys that had been reduced to narrow passageways between mountains of snow. We were on our way to the house of Utkin's grandfather, who let us stay in his big izba on our visits to the city.

Walking along Indian file in the depths of this maze of snow, we were silent. The universe we had just been exposed to remained, for the moment, beyond words. All there was to express it was the languid beauty of the night of the thaw, the quiet breathing of the taiga, these close stars, the denser color of the sky and the more vivid tones of the snows. But we could still only sense it in our flesh, in the quivering of our nostrils, in our young bodies, which drank in both the starry sky and the scents of the taiga. Filled to the brim with this new universe, we carried it in silence, afraid of spilling its magical contents. Only a repressed sigh escaped occasionally to convey this overload of emotions: "Belmondo…"

It was in Utkin's grandfather's izba that the eruption took place. We ll began shouting at the same time, waving our arms and leaping around, each eager to portray the film in the most lively manner. We roared, as we struggled in the nets flung by our enemies; we snatched the glamorous creature from the sadistic clutches of the executioners as they prepared to cut off one of her breasts; we machine-gunned the walls before rolling onto a divan. We were at one and the same time the spy in the telephone booth and the shark pointing its aggressive snout, and even the can of fish soup!

We were transformed into a pyrotechnic display of gestures, grimaces, and yells. We were discovering the ineffable language of our new universe. That of Belmondo!

In any other circumstance, Utkin's grandfather, a man with the corpulence of a weary and melancholy giant, whose slow gait and white hair made him reminiscent of a polar bear, would have quickly rebuked us. But on this occasion he watched our triple performance in silence. The three of us together must have succeeded in re-creating the atmosphere of the film. Yes, he must have pictured the underground labyrinth Ht by the dismal flames of torches, and the wall to which the glamorous martyr was chained. He saw a monstrous figure, squat and shriveled, cackling with perverse and impotent lust, as he drew closer to his scantily clad victim and raised a pitilessly glittering blade over her delectable breast. But a mingled roar came from our three outraged throats. The hero, triple in his strength and beauty, flexed his muscles, broke the chains, and flew to the aid of the gorgeous prisoner…

The polar bear screwed up his eyes mischievously and left the room.

Samurai and I broke off our theatricals, thinking we had really offended Grandfather too much. Only Utkin remained in his actor's trance, shuddering as if it were he who risked losing a breast.

Grandfather reappeared in the room, grasping the neck of a bottle of champagne with his great knotty fingers. My eyes opened wide. Samurai uttered a resounding "Aha!" And Utkin emerged from his epileptic fit and summed up all our emotions in a single exclamation, still talking about the film: "Well, that's the West for you!

Grandfather put three chipped china cups and a thick glass tumbler on the table.

"I've been saving this bottle for a friend," he explained, liberating the cork from the wire top. "But he, poor fellow, had the odd idea of dying in the meantime. He was a friend from the front…"

We hardly heard his explanations. The cork leaped out with a joyful crack, there was a moment of cheerful urgency – abundant froth, fierce popping of bubbles, a white surge spilling onto the tablecloth. And finally the first mouthful of champagne, the very first in our lives…

It was only years later, thanks to that bitter clarification of the past that comes with age, that we would remember the friend from the front… But on that evening of the thaw long ago there was only this icy tickling inside our scorched throats, which caused tears of joy to well up. A happy weariness like that of actors after a first night. And Utkin's summary, still ringing in our ears: "Well, that's the West for you!"

Yes, the Western World was born in the sparkle of Crimean champagne, in the middle of a big izba buried in the snow after a French film several years old.

It was the Western World at its most authentic, because engendered in vitro. In that thick glass tumbler that had been washed by whole waves of vodka. And also in our virgin imaginations. In the crystalline purity of the air of the taiga.

It was there, the West. And that night we dreamed of it with open eyes in the bluish darkness of the izba… And three shadowy figures appeared on that southern promenade, whom the summer visitors certainly will not have noticed. These three figures walked around a telephone booth, strolled past a café terrace, and, with their timid gaze, followed two young creatures with beautiful tanned legs…

Our first steps in the Western World.

We were flying through the taiga, stretched out along the trunks of cedar trees on the trailer of a powerful tractor, like those that carried rockets in the army. The rough bark under our backs, the sky sparkling above our eyes, the silvery shadows of the forest on either side of the road. The sunny air inflated our sheepskin coats like sails and shot us through with the smell of resin.

It was strictly forbidden to transport people on trailers, especially when loaded. But the driver had accepted us with cheerful nonchalance. It was the first sign of the changes brought into our existence by Belmondo…

The window of the cabin was lowered, so soft did the air seem that morning. And all along the road we could hear the driver telling the story of the film to his passenger, the foreman of the loggers. Lying flat out on the trees, we followed his narration, delivered with exclamations, oaths, and broad gestures, as his hands perilously left the steering wheel.

From time to time he uttered a particularly ringing cry. "He's got his first tooth, my boy! Ha ha ha! You know what I mean? That's it. My wife wrote to me…"

And he resumed his narrative: "So then he pulls on the chains with all his strength, like that… Sure thing, you could hear his bones cracking. Wow! And bingo! he chucks them in the air. And the other one, with his blade, was just a couple of steps away from the girl. And she – I can't tell you what a great pair of tits she's got. And this bastard wants to cut one of them off. You know what I mean? So the guy goes in right under him and ker-pow! No, no, don't worry. I'm holding the wheel."

And again he interrupted his story to proclaim his fatherly pride: "Hey, the little rascal! His first tooth… Milka writes: 'I can't feed him anymore – he bites my breast till it bleeds' Ha ha ha! He's just like his dad."

The world seemed wonderfully transfigured. All we needed was a miracle to be finally convinced of it. And the miracle came. It was close to the Devil's Bend, even more dangerous under the drifts from the snowstorm. At the place where we should have been moving cautiously, making a slow descent to the bank of the Olyei. But the story was reaching its culmination…

The tractor with its heavy trailer hurtled down the slope, without even slowing down, and plunged out over the thin ice undermined by warm springs…

There was a yell, quickly stifled, from inside the cabin; an oath uttered by Samurai. And then several apocalyptic and interminable seconds, filled with the creaking of the ice giving way under the wheels…

We came to ourselves a hundred yards farther along, already on the other bank. The driver stopped the engine and jumped out into the snow. His passenger followed him. The white surface of the river was incised by two black tracks that were slowly filling with water…

In the absolute silence, nothing could be heard but a faint whistling coming from the engine. The sky had quite a new sparkle to it.

Later, no doubt, the driver and the foreman would talk about a crazy stroke of luck. Or about the speed of the tractor, which had been flying along, scarcely touching the ground. But without their admitting it to themselves, the ruins of the church on the highest part of the riverbank would come into their minds. And without knowing how to think about it, let alone talk about it, they would muse on that remote childish presence (the first tooth!). Maybe this had mysteriously sustained the heavy machine as it crossed the fragile ice…

But we preferred to believe in a simple miracle; from now on this would be so natural in our lives.

On my return, everything in our izba seemed strange to me. It was the strangeness of familiar objects staring at me with curiosity; they seemed to be waiting for my first move. The day before yesterday I had left that room in the morning, to go to school. Since then there had been the switch operator's shanty; the station waiting room; the snowstorm; the house of the red-haired woman; the bridge; the truckdriver… I shook my head, overcome with a singular dizziness. Yes, then my return across the snow-filled valley, the rusty nails of the hanged men…

My aunt came in, carrying the big kettle.

"I've made some pancakes, but some of them are burned; you can leave those," she said in her most normal voice, putting on the table a plate with a pile of golden pancakes.

I looked at this woman in perplexity. There she was entering the room, and she was coming from quite a different era. From before the snowstorm… Suddenly I remembered that there had been the sunny promenade beside the sea, the shark, the underground chamber with the chained beauty… I felt myself reeling. Without explaining anything to my aunt, I left the room and pushed open the front door.

The evening sun was drowsing behind the castellated skyline of the taiga, caught in the watchtowers' invisible trap. Thanks to the purplish haze from the mild spell, you could stare at the coppery disk without screwing up your eyes. And the disk, I was sure, was swaying slightly above the barbed wire…

Next day when Samurai knocked on our door and said to me with a wink: "Let's go!" there was no mistaking what he proposed.

We put on our snowshoes, collected Utkin close by his izba, and left Svetlaya…

The city, twenty-three miles by road, was nineteen if you cut through the taiga. Eight hours on the march, plus a couple of stops to have a bite to eat and especially to give Utkin a breather. An entire day's journey. At the end of it: a sunset and the mists of the city that lay between two arms of the taiga, where it opened out gradually. And closer and closer came the hour, which each time became more magical: six-thirty P.M. The evening performance. Belmondo's.

Already the dense taiga was opening out; our snowy road was leading us straight to that promenade beside the sea and into the midst of that tanned crowd of extraterrestrials in the Western World…

The first time, we had understood little. And indeed, there were things in the film it was hard for us to comprehend. The character of the publisher, for example. His relationship with our hero was an absolute mystery to us. Why was Belmondo afraid of this obese, inelegant man who hid his baldness under a wig? What dominion could he exercise over our superman and by what right? How dared he carelessly cast aside the manuscript that our hero brought him in his office?

For want of any credible explanation, we concluded it was sexual rivalry. And indeed, the hero's lovely neighbor was the target of repeated assaults by this monstrous literary bureaucrat. The whole audience held its breath when, drooling with lust, he feasted his prying eyes on the delectable backside of the young woman as she rashly leaned a little too far over the desk. And it was he who later pounced on the unfortunate woman, scattering his thick-lipped kisses all over her body when her defenses were down as a result of a treacherous drugged cigarette…

Many of the nuances in this film escaped us. But thanks to our sixth sense, as young savages from the taiga, we could perceive intuitively what intellectually we could not know about the lives of Westerners. And we had decided to see the film ten or twenty times over if need be, but to understand everything! Everything down to the detail that tortured us for several days: when the lovely creature called on our hero, who was evidently a most welcoming host, why did she refuse his offer of a glass of whiskey?

9

We saw the film seventeen times. In fact, we no longer watched it, we lived in it. Having once tiptoed our way warily onto the sunny promenade, we now set about exploring the most intimate nooks and crannies of this secret world. The plot was learned by heart. Now we could allow ourselves to study its surroundings and its backdrops: A piece of furniture in the hero's apartment – some little cupboard whose use was unknown, which the director himself very likely never noticed. A bend in the road, which the cameraman had framed without attaching the least importance to it. Or the reflection of a gray Parisian spring morning on the long thigh of the lovely neighbor, asleep half naked in front of our hero's door. Oh, that reflection! For us it became the eighth color of the rainbow; the one most necessary to the chromatic harmony of the world.

But above all, Belmondo… He embodied this whole complex repertoire of adventures, colors, passionate embraces, roars, leaps, kisses, breaking waves, musky scents, brushes with death. He was the key to this magic universe, its fulcrum, its engine. Its god…

We grasped the reason for his quicksilver performance. Indeed. He lived at this furious pace, embarking on a new action sequence before he had finished the last one, because he strove to achieve divine omnipresence. To bring together through his muscular and supple body all the elements of the universe. To become the very substance of their fusion. Like a human blender, he mixed an intoxicating cocktail from the dazzling spray of the waves, the sensual pulp of feminine bodies, lovers' panting, war cries, tropical languor, triumphant biceps, and a host of characters created with the titanic fecundity of the pagan gods: good, evil, droll, sensitive, eccentric, falsely tender, perverse, myth-omaniac…

He was a celestial clockmaker, who wound up the giant watch spring of this mind-blowing universe, set the southern sun and the languid stars on their courses. And his boxer's lungs breathed life into every soul that revolved around him. The carousel gathered speed, the cascading action sequences were transformed into a burlesque Niagara. And we were carried along on its torrent.

There were nevertheless times when our hero, while in full amorous and military cry, would suddenly stop and choose to be solitary, sad, misunderstood. Like a god in the midst of his creation when it no longer has need of him… Then a moment later he would fly off into the sky, attached to some fiery helicopter. But we who were tucked away in an obscure corner of his universe had glimpsed that moment of melancholy and solitude…

The process of exploring the Western World continued, with its setbacks and its victories. One day we finally succeeded in defining the role of the publisher. He was classified: an evil man whose sexual appetite bore no relation to his physical and intellectual insignificance, a being who preyed on the noblest human gift, the capacity to dream.

This discovery coincided with another one, three or four showings later. We solved the mystery of the doubling of Belmondo!

The coming and going between the luxurious villas frequented by the master spy and the writer's modest apartment; between the athlete with a sunburned body and the slave to the typewriter who is more or less depressive and ravaged by nicotine addiction – this disconcerting alternation finally yielded its secret. And it was the glamorous spy who greatly assisted our investigation.

For she, too, was quite ambiguous. Chained to the wall of the underground chamber, she struggled; her struggling was highly provocative. Her tattered dress was on the brink of spilling out a magnificent breast into the lubricious palm of the transmogrified publisher. A superb breast, destined for a sadistic mastectomy. Her emerald eyes, admirably slanting, were those of a captured antelope. Her body had the aerodynamic curves of that noble animal. Her abundant hair rippled over her bare shoulders. The sadist approached, brandishing his blade, and we almost regretted that the hero's chains had yielded so quickly. Another moment, and the publisher-executioner would have stripped the marvelous antelope's body of those useless rags…

It took us at least ten showings before we began to recognize the features of the antelope in the appearance of the rather pale student who lived in the same apartment building as the writer. This remote prototype for the glamorous spy, this pale shadow, was seen m a very humdrum setting of rainy days in Paris – a tall girl in jeans, her generous outlines erased, flattened out. A thick sweater camouflaged all hint of curves, eliminated all trace of sensuality. Her serious student's glasses dulled the sparkle in her eyes. And yet it was still she, our antelope with the shapely and muscular buttocks, our spy whose heaving bosom swelled full and round beneath the tatters of her dress.

Yes, it was she. But what a difference! The student in the Parisian rain seemed like an abortive double for the antelope of the tropical nights.

And it was by comparing this drab replica with the original that we glimpsed the secret of Western man's fantasies. Or rather those of the Western husband… The gorgeous antelope, the original – endowed with all possible physical charms – was his mistress, real or imagined. And the copy, devoid of all the sensual extras, was his wife…

And how perspicacious our juvenile discovery was! Twenty years later, wandering through the capitals of the West, we would rediscover this erotic ambiguity that Belmondo had suggested to us. The women of male fantasies – on the covers of magazines or in red-light districts – would have breasts capable of tempting any sadistic publisher, and full golden thighs, like those of our fabulous antelope. While the wives would go on show with the bony angles of their shoulders, their nonexistent hips, and their flat chests. People would talk to us about the fashion, the style of the times, the puritan ideal, the equality of the sexes. But we would not be fooled. For we had explored that Western World of ours down to its murky subconscious depths!

Why Belmondo? Why in those long ago days at the time of the mild spell? In the blue dusk of February? At the six-thirty performance, when they generally showed long war films? In the Red October cinema, half buried in the snow?

What occurred was a veritable epidemic of Belmondophilia. A Belmondomania that had nothing in common with a passing infatuation for some Italian comedy or a fleeting craze for a Hollywood western. After the second performance the management of the Red October was compelled to put in an extra row of seats. We even saw one spectator sitting on a stool he had brought from home… And the charm did not fade!

In the long waiting line, which almost matched that of the visitors to Lenin's tomb, we saw more and more unlikely people appearing. Two brothers Nerestov, renowned sable hunters who rarely came to the city – and then only to pour a fluid stream of furs from their bags… It was so strange to see them lining up in front of the ticket window among the citizens in their Sunday best. Their faces tanned by the icy wind; their enormous silver-fox fur shapkas; their curly beards: everything about them evoked their solitary life in the heart of the taiga…

And then the legendary home distiller Sova, a robust and intrepid old woman, whom the militia had never managed to catch in flagrante delicto. She carried out her criminal activities, according to some people, in an abandoned mine, whose exit, half caved in, was hidden amid the gooseberry bushes in her garden. We always pictured her in the vaults of this gold mine, beneath the wooden supports, ht by the uncertain light of an oil lamp. A witch busy at her stills… This dark mine was only a step removed from the underground chamber with the beauty in chains, rescued by our hero. Old Sova took that step, her head held high, and came and sat down in the front row one day, dressed in her full brown sheepskin coat, with a monumental fox-fur hat on her head.

Yes, soon Belmondomania seemed like a powerful ground swell that brought surprising human species to the surface of our life. It was a surge that ran through the most remote villages, seeped into foresters' lodges, and, visibly, even shook the icy calm of the watchtowers. Each performance brought its surprises…

One day I noticed that the seat next to me was empty. We always sat in the front row. No longer because we had arrived late, but in order to be alone face-to-face with Belmondo, to be able to make our way onto the sunlit promenade without having to step over heads and fox-fur hats… The empty seat on my left did not surprise me unduly at first. Someone had decided to come in after the newsreel, I thought, making use of those ten minutes of Kremlinian news to smoke a cigarette in the foyer. However, the newsreel – on this occasion, apart from the inevitable presentation of medals, we saw some marine fishermen who had overfulfilled the fishing plan by thirty percent – yes, the newsreel came to an end, the lights came on for a moment and then went off again, but the seat remained unoccupied. I was already preparing to move, as the empty seat seemed to me more centered…

It was at that moment that the huge silhouette of a stooping man slipped across the screen, which was already ablaze with the brilliance of the south, and I felt one of his heavy boots stumbling against my feet in the darkness. The tardy spectator settled in his seat. Before the arrival of the helicopter above the telephone booth, I glanced at my neighbor…

Recognizing him, I began slowly shrinking down between the armrests. I wanted to make myself very small, invisible, nonexistent.

For it was Gera. Gerassim Tugai was his real name. A name pronounced by all the inhabitants of the region in tones of nervous respect. He was the one who was "stealing gold from the state," in the opinion of my aunt and her friends. The one who was being frantically sought after by the militia and whom we had passed one summer's day in the heart of the taiga. The one who, hidden away in the wild and inaccessible depths, washed the gold-bearing sand of a little clear, fast-flowing river amid the silence of the centenarian cedar trees.

Overcoming my fear, I stared at him discreetly. His broad bearskin coat smelled of the fresh wind of the snowy spaces. His shapka, with earflaps tied at the back of his neck, was reminiscent of a great Nordic warrior's helmet. He sat in a proudly independent posture, his huge silhouette towering above the whole row of spectators.

The more I examined his profile by the changing and multicolored light of the screen, the more a strange resemblance emerged in his features. Yes, he reminded me of someone I knew very well… But who? On his brow, a lock of hair escaped from below the shapka… A flattened nose, the result of some brawl, no doubt. A determined set to his lips, a slightly carnivorous smile. A powerful, massive jaw. And that lively brown eye…

Dumbfounded and not daring to trust my intuition, I looked at the screen. Belmondo was emerging from the glittering azure of a swimming pool and settling into a deck chair beside the glamorous spy. I studied his profile. The lock of hair he tossed back from his wet brow, his nose, his lips. His eyes… I turned toward my neighbor. Then toward the screen. And once again toward the man in the bearskin…

Yes, it was he. There are no explanations for magic. Nor did I try to understand. I remained in a strange zone between-two-worlds, between these two perfectly similar faces, brought together within the alchemist's distilling flask that the dark space of the Red October cinema had become. In the midst of a slow transmutation of the real into something more true and more beautiful…

I came to my senses with a start. My neighbor's great boots had caught on my feet in passing. He was leaving the auditorium one or two minutes before the end. The glass flask was shattered. I almost ran after him, whispering: "Wait, you're going to miss the best scene in the film!" It was the one in which the lovely neighbor was asleep outside the hero's door, revealing her long thigh that was the eighth color of the rainbow…

I did not run. I did not call out. We could hear the side door softly closing. The man in the bearskin had disappeared…

When the lights came on among the slow-moving, dazzled, and smiling crowd we could see two uniformed officers. Their epaulets were colored crimson, the distinctive insignia of the units that guarded the camp. The spectators gave them amused, furtive looks, as much as to say: "Aha! You, too…"

Yes, they, too, had spent time in the magic flask. Alongside the redoubtable Gera…

I never spoke about him to Samurai or Utkin. They would doubtless have laughed in my face. But after that strange evening I have come to realize that magic is broken precisely because man dares neither speak of it nor believe in it. He shows himself unworthy of miracles by trying to reduce them to some banal material cause.

Besides, during the time of that mild weather one miracle more or less was not an issue. The day after the mysterious appearance of the man in the bearskin, whom should we see in the waiting line but… Utkin's grandfather! He looked quite embarrassed, like an adult caught red-handed in some piece of childishness. And he hastened to justify himself: "Well, what do you expect? The whole world talks of nothing else… A friend of mine who's a doctor told me one of his patients asked him to delay his operation so that he could go and see this film. So I thought…"

And to exonerate himself he paid for all four tickets.

Why Belmondo?

With his flattened nose, he looked like many of us. Our life – taiga, vodka, camps – sculpted faces of this type. Faces with a barbaric beauty that shone through the roughness of their tortured features.

Why him? Because he waited for us. He did not abandon us on the threshold of some luxurious palace, but – thanks to the coming and going between his dreams and his ordinary life – he was always at our side. We could follow him into the unimaginable.

We also loved him for the magnificent uselessness of his exploits. For the joyful absurdity of his triumphs and his conquests. The world we inhabited was based on the crushing inevitability of the radiant future. We were all conscripted into this logic – the weaver darting between her hundred and fifty looms, the marine fisherman trawling the fourteen seas of the empire, the loggers undertaking to cut down more each year. This irresistible progress defined the object of our presence on this planet. The awarding of decorations at the Kremlin was the supreme symbol of it. And even the camp found its place in this planned harmony – a place was certainly needed for those who showed themselves to be temporarily unworthy of the great project, for the inevitable dross of our paradisal existence.

But now came Belmondo with his pointless exploits, his achievements with no purpose, his gratuitous heroism. We saw a strength that took pride in itself with no thought for the result; the gleam of muscles that were not concerned to break productivity records. We discovered that the physical presence of a man could be beautiful in itself! Without any ulterior motive, be it messianic, ideological, or futurist. From now on we had a name for this marvelous "in itself": Western World.

And then there was also that encounter at the airport. The spy who was to meet our hero had to have about her person an agreed object, an identifying sign. And it was a… karavai, a loaf of black bread, Russian – you can't get more Russian than that – and called by its Russian name in a French film! A shout of delight and national pride ran through the rows at the Red October cinema… On the way back to Svetlaya this time we spoke of nothing else: so over there in the Western World they did have an inkling that we existed!

Why Belmondo?

Because he arrived at the right moment. He erupted in the midst of the snowbound taiga as if propelled there by a fantastic film stunt. Yes, it was one of his action sequences – a dazzling series of leaps, chases, pistol shots and fisticuffs, falls, spins of the steering wheel, takeoffs and touchdowns. That was how he had touched down in the midst of the taiga!

He arrived at the moment when the discontinuity between the promised future and our own present was on the brink of making us irremediably schizophrenic. When in the name of our messianic project the fishermen were preparing to leave not one single fish in the seas, and the loggers to transform the taiga into a desert of ice. While back in the Kremlin one old man was decorating another and anointing him "three times Hero of Socialist Labor" and "four times Hero of the Soviet Union," and there was no space left on the shrunken chest of the decorated person for all those gold stars…

When Belmondo took Siberia by storm, all that was part of it. The Kremlin; the hundred and fifty weaving looms; vodka as the sole means to combat the schizophrenic rupture between the future and the present. Not to mention the disk of the setting sun trapped in the barbed wire…

He leaped from a helicopter hooked onto the end of the Siberian sky, rolled in the snow, and erupted on the screen, inviting us to follow him… It was a stroll beside the warm sea. By constantly turning our backs on the distant silhouette of the radiant future, we advanced gingerly into that terra incognita: the Western World.

But more than anything else: it was love…

What did I know of it, what did any of the audience know of it, before his arrival? We knew there was I've-had-her love. The most common currency in the emotional life of our rough country. And eternally-waiting-by-the-ferry love… And there was another kind, the one we generally encountered on the screen at the Red October. I recall one very typical film about love…

Boy meets girl. On a path in the midst of the fields of rye, in the evening. They walk along silently, artistically shy, heaving eloquent sighs from time to time. The moment of decision approaches. The audience holds still, subsides, waiting for an appropriate embrace. The young kolkhoznik removes his cap, makes a broad circular gesture, and declares: "You know the rye this year, Masha: I bet it yields twelve quintals per hectare!"

A groan of frustration shook the darkened auditorium.

Especially because the heroine was very beautiful and her partner definitely virile. If her dress had been ripped into tatters, we would have been able to gaze at breasts just as well rounded as the one Belmondo's ravishing prisoner was in danger of losing. If she had lain down in the grass – which the whole auditorium was ardently longing for – then the shapeliness of her thighs would easily have rivaled the sensual curves of the spy…

But all the lovers could see, hovering over the fields in the evening, was the misty outline of the messianic project, the sunbathed peaks of the future. They stifled their natural urges and concentrated on talking about the harvest… The kiss came as a more or less optional extra. It made the screen go dark. And before it Ht up again we heard the first wails of the baby that had appeared in the arms of its happy mother. Clearly these moments of darkness were a filmic expression of the night of the gestation period…

The gulf between this official modesty and I've-had-her love was the same as that which lay between the prophetic future and Nerlug in the present. And at the bottom of this chasm was the house of the red-haired prostitute. A woman with a heavy, weary body. A woman who weeps as she lays out on a blanket photos with the edges carefully trimmed. Heaven knows why. Showing them to an adolescent who can only think of that dead bird within him – his dream of love. At the bottom of this chasm was that night of snowstorm and the Transsiberian backtracking. The washed-out face of the woman above the candle flame and her fingers caressing my hair…

Belmondo held out his hand to this adolescent with a dead bird nestling close to his heart. He drew him toward the southern sun. And the terrifying and unspeakable lava of love found words to speak its name with Western clarity: seduction, desire, conquest, sex, eroticism, passion. Like a true professional in love, he even included in his analysis the possible setbacks and disappointments that lie in wait for the young seducer in the early stages of his adventure. We saw him preparing a candlelit dinner to which he had invited his neighbor. He put on a dark suit, went on waiting and… fell asleep in the posture of a vanquished gladiator. She never came…

Yes, the leap into the abyss of love was also an element in his storming of Siberia. And so that there should be no doubt on this subject, he had come and sat down beside me, disguised as Gerassim Tugai, in the front row of the Red October cinema…

The thaw lasted only a few days. The winter took its revenge on this luminous interlude and brought a stinging polar wind, froze the stars in the black crystal of the sky.

But Belmondo fought back. On every free day or, as often as not, missing our classes at school, we woke up before sunrise and set off for the city. For the fourteenth time, the fifteenth, the sixteenth… We did not tire.

10

In the forest it was still night. The snow was sometimes gilded by the moon, sometimes intensely blue. Every young pine tree seemed like an animal lying in wait, every shadow was alive and watching us. We spoke little, not daring to break the solemn silence of this sleeping kingdom. From time to time a pine branch shook off a great white cap of snow. We heard the muffled rustling, then the stifled sound of it falling. And for a long time afterward crystals would flutter down beneath this awakened branch, iridescent green, blue, and mauve spangles. And everything became still again in the dreamy silver light of the moon… Sometimes we heard a light rustling, while all the branches remained motionless. We pricked up our ears: "Wolves?" And above the clearing we saw the shadow of an owl passing. The silence was so pure that we seemed to feel the density and the suppleness of the icy air as the great gray wings of the bird cut into it.

It was during those still-shadowy hours of night that I liked to return to my secret…

My companions were traveling through the forest to go and see a comedy, to learn some more dialogue by heart, to laugh. If I was on my way to the Red October, it was to participate in a miraculous transfiguration: soon I was going to have another body, another soul; and the bird in my breast was going to dance around my heart, fluffing out its feathers. But for the moment it did not stir. And with mournful relish I bore my adult grief within me – the house of the red-haired woman.

I believed my sorrow to be unique, just like the transfiguration that awaited me in the promised land of the Western World. And I would have been quite astonished to learn that Samurai and Utkin, as they slipped through the sleeping taiga, also carried beneath their sheepskin coats a grief and a hope. An enigma. A mysterious past. I was not the only member of the elect…

The mystery surrounding Samurai was harsh and simple. He confided it to me one winter's evening a month before the arrival of our hero. We were in our little izba bathhouse, he in his copper tub, I stretched out on the hot, humid wood of the bench. Gusts of wind were peppering the tiny window with the dry snow that the great frosts bring. Samurai remained silent for a long time, then he began talking in a tone of assumed jocularity. As you do when recounting some childhood escapade. But it was palpable that at any moment his nonchalant voice was in danger of lurching into a stifled cry of pain…

He must have been ten years old at the time. On a hot day in July, one of those scorching days in the continental summer, Samurai – who had not yet been nicknamed Samurai – came running out of the water. Quite naked, shivering under the baking sun. The river never became any warmer during those few weeks of midsummer heat.

He came out and ran toward the bushes where he had hung his clothes. Suddenly, stumbling against a stone or a thick root, he fell. He had no time to grasp that it was not a root: he had been cunningly tripped. Two hands gripped his waist. On all fours, he made an attempt to get away, still suspecting nothing. At the same moment he saw leather boots in front of him, felt the weight of a hand seizing his wet hair. He let out a cry. Then the one who had been squeezing his haunches began to punch him in the kidneys. Samurai arched his back, groaned, tried to escape again. But the heavy hand that was gripping his hair now fastened itself around his face like a muzzle. Two fingers with flat yellow nails were thrust into the base of his eye sockets – it was a threat: "One more shout and I'll poke your eyes out." However, he had time to notice that the man in front of him had knelt down. He heard several oaths and some rather nervous sniggering. Samurai did not understand why, if they wanted to kill him, they were so slow in producing a knife or a pike… It seemed as if the one who was behind him was trying to tear his naked body in two by pulling his wet legs apart. Samurai cried out in pain, and in a momentary glimpse, which would remain with him, he saw that one of his attackers was starting to unbutton his pants…

When danger threatens, a child reverts more readily to being the animal that is not yet wholly dormant within it. Only the agility of this animal saved Samurai. His body performed a series of movements of a rapidity beyond human perception. They were not so much actions as an electric vibration that ran through his body from his head to his feet. His arm threw off the hand muzzling him at the very instant when he raised his head slightly to weaken the pressure of the fingers in his eyes. His foot, abruptly lifted, went into the belly of his aggressor. His shoulder touched the grass, dragging his vibrating body toward the river…

But his transformation into a young animal caught in a trap had not been quite complete. At the last moment something in his back seemed to give way. A searing pain ran through it to the base of his skull. Samurai thought he would not be able to move another step. Once he had plunged into the water, however, the pain left him. As if the cold and supple stream had put everything back in place in his tortured young body…

He found himself on the opposite bank. He stared at the river with stupefaction. He had never before swum the Olyei. Too wide, too fast. He could not feel his body, could not distinguish between his own breathing and the respiration of the cedar trees. His soaked head was humming, melting into the luminous sky. And somewhere in the midst of this organism, without beginning or end, dissipated within the immensity of the taiga, could be heard the repeated, resonant calling of a cuckoo…

On the opposite bank Samurai saw nobody. He waited until evening before returning. This time he swam holding on to a floating tree trunk. The Olyei was once more becoming impossible to cross. His clothes had not been touched. There were several cigarette butts scattered on the trampled ground…

From that day forth Samurai became obsessed by strength.

Before that the world had been good. And simple. Like the tranquil luminosity of those white clouds in the sky and their reflection in the living mirror of the Olyei. But now there was this viscous stuff that lay stagnating in the dark pores of life, which were masked by words, by smiles. This was strength. At any moment it could overwhelm you, crush you against the ground, break you in half.

Samurai started to hate the strong. And in order to be able to resist them, he decided to harden his body. He wanted the animal agility that had saved him to become completely natural…

By the autumn he could cross the river and back without resting. Hurling ourselves stark naked into the snow on emerging from the baths under the icy sky was his idea. In the beginning it was simply a military exercise… He also knew that one must harden the edge of the hand. As the Japanese did. Soon he was breaking thick dry branches at the first blow. At the age of thirteen he had the strength of an adult man. He did not yet have the endurance. He often arrived at school with his face covered in bruises, his finger joints raw. But he was smiling. He was no longer afraid of the strong.

Then one day he swapped a tiny gold nugget (we all had a few nuggets) for a colorful foreign postcard. The glossy picture showed a blue sea, an avenue lined with palm trees and white houses with big windows. This was Cuba. The newspapers were constantly speaking of this country and of its people, who had the courage to resist the might of the United States. His hatred of the strong found its global target: Samurai fell in love with the little island and detested the Americans. His romantic attachment was embodied in a feminine figure he dreamed of: a beautiful companion in arms, a young woman fighter with Creole comeliness, who wore a combat uniform with rolled-up sleeves…

But this love, just like the hatred, came too late. Revolutionary fervor was a thing of the past, and even in the depths of our Siberia they were beginning to make open fun of our old bearded friend. Likewise of Samurai, whose passion was known to everyone. The boys at school often sang for his benefit a jingle that had become very popular. It went to the tune of Castro's heroic "Barbudos" song, but the words were all different, tampered with:

Cuba , give us back our wheat. Give us back our vodka too. Your sugar's wet - and not too sweet. Fidel, take it back, fuck you!

Samurai looked at them with disdain. The insolence of the weak was a puzzle: these mockers knew that he would not condescend to give them a hiding… But deep inside, Samurai was troubled by a lot of embarrassing questions. Especially after the day when he received the ultimate blow below the belt from History.

It came at the end of a geography lesson. That day the teacher was talking about Central America. When the bell rang and the classroom emptied, Samurai walked up to the desk and took the colorful postcard with the view of Havana out of his bag. The azure sea, the palm trees, the white villas, the tanned strollers. The teacher studied it, then, turning it over, read the caption.

"Ah, of course," he confirmed. "But that was before the revolution! I was wondering…"

He fell silent, then handed the card back to Samurai and explained, turning away: "You know, they are in a rather difficult economic situation… Without our aid it would be really tough. An old friend of mine worked there as a volunteer. He says that even socks are rationed, one pair a year per person… Of course, it's the imperialist blockade that causes that…"

Samurai was stunned. So one must picture the bold "bar-budos," their automatic rifles in their hands, waiting in line to get a new pair of socks!

When Belmondo arrived, Samurai was sixteen. All the wretched questions provoked by his disillusioned love were in the process of turning into a trauma that prevented him from seeing, breathing, smiling. He had become strong, but the evil that he set out to combat renewed itself like the heads of the Hydra. With the arrival of a new team of loggers; with a new drunken brawl on the steps of the liquor store. At the very most, all he had managed to conquer was a narrow zone of security around his own person. Life did not change. And the fair companion in arms, in her khaki pants and her combat jacket with rolled-up sleeves, had not yet shown up.

While the Yankee blue jeans that had made their appearance on the chubby legs of a local apparatchik's son were wreaking havoc among the hearts of the local Siberian maidens…

So should he go on breaking branches with the edge of his hand? Crossing the river while holding an iron bar above his head, a substitute for a future automatic rifle? Rebuking drunken loggers? Cutting off the Hydra's heads and doubling the evil? Living as if on a blockaded island? Defending weak people, who then hurl their perfidious mockery at your back?

It was then that Samurai encountered Belmondo. He witnessed his pointless feats, his fight for fight's sake. He discovered that to take up arms could be beautiful. That landing a blow could have its elegance. That the gesture was often worth more than the effort's objective. That what counted was panache.

Samurai was discovering the bitter aesthetic of the desperate struggle against evil. He saw it as the only way out of the labyrinth of awkward questions. Yes, to take up arms, thinking only of the beauty of the combat! To hurl oneself as a single trooper into the action sequence of war. And to quit the field of battle before the grateful weak can come and praise you to the skies or reproach you for any excesses. Yes, to fight, knowing that victory would be short-lived. Like in the film… Though the publisher was vanquished, turned into a laughingstock, and lost his wig, he would soon return to his inaccessible office. But the beauty of those last few moments would be the hero's best reward. Embracing his lovely neighbor – now won back – he leans over the balcony and hurls the pages of his manuscript at the retreating publisher and his clique. What madness, but what a gesture!

A week after the first showing Samurai had a fight with two drunken truckers in the workers' canteen. All the conventions were respected in this classic barroom scenario. The strident shrieking of the canteen woman; the silence of the human herd gripped both by fear and by the reflex "It's got nothing to do with me." And the young male lead who rises to his feet at the end of the room and walks toward the two aggressors. The truckers were newcomers; they did not know that this young man's hand broke thick branches at the first blow. Two or three lunges from his hand-sword sufficed to evict them. But Samurai could no longer be content for the scene to end like that. He went back into the canteen. Watched by the diners, rigid in front of their plates, he put down a crumpled ruble note in front of the cashier, as she cowered behind her counter, and remarked: "Those miserable wretches forgot to pay for their soup."

Then he strode out into the icy wind, accompanied by a buzz of admiration…

Back home, he sat down in front of a mirror and stared at himself for a long time. A lock of dark hair fell across his brow; his nose was slightly squashed – the relic of some unequal combat; his lips were tensed in a determined Une; a heavy lower jaw was accustomed to taking cannonball blows from the weighty fists of men. He gave a friendly wink at the face looking back at him out of the mirror. He had recognized him. He had recognized himself… Never had our fabled Western World seemed so close!

11

The sun was rising as we came out of the taiga, heading for the valley of the Olyei. As if we were leaving the night behind us deep inside that sleeping kingdom of pine trees, where the great owl glided through the silvery shadows, seeking a refuge for the daylight hours.

The red disk appeared from behind a cold veil and slowly replaced the gray and blue tones with shades of pink. Shaking off our nocturnal torpor, we began to talk, to exchange impressions of the last performance. But above all, to the point of exhaustion and of losing our voices, to imitate Belmondo…

This time, on our sixteenth trip to see the film, Samurai went ahead of us a little, striking out with long strides over the plain, whose smooth mauve surface was so inviting. I stopped to wait for Utkin. As he left the shadows of the forest and emerged onto this great, luminous space, he swung around the tip of a small pine tree buried under the snow and came to join me.

His gaze always used to make me feel a bit uneasy. The mixture of jealousy, despair, and resignation with which he surveyed my face…

This time there was none of it. Dragging his injured leg, he came up to me, his right shoulder pointing toward the sky, and smiled. He looked at me squarely like an equal, with neither bitterness nor jealousy. His duckling's gait seemed no longer to preoccupy him. I was struck by the serenity of his face. As I set off again, I told myself that I had been seeing these calm and somehow wiser eyes for some time now. I slowed my speed somewhat, allowing myself to be overtaken. Replying absentmindedly to the remarks of my companions, I began to think about the mystery surrounding Utkin.

For he, too, saw the six-thirty performance as much more than a simple burlesque comedy…

On that spring day long ago when his body had been crushed by the ice floes in the thaw, his child's eyes had undergone a change of vision. In that instant Utkin had acquired a particular view of things such as only extreme pain or pleasure can bestow. At these moments we can observe ourselves – from a distance – as a stranger. A stranger unrecognizable in his overwhelming pain or in the spasms of extreme pleasure. For a few seconds we sustain this division into two…

Utkin had seen himself that way. Against the pale wall of a hospital room. His suffering was so great that he was on the brink of asking himself: "But who is he, this thin little fellow, moaning and shivering in his plaster shell?" Yes, it was very early, at the age of eleven, that he experienced this perception. The maimed body crying out, suffering; and alongside it, it's hard to know exactly where, the detached, calm scrutiny. A bitter and serene presence. Like a bright autumn day, with the penetrating smell of dead leaves. Utkin knew this presence was also himself: a part of him. Perhaps the most important part. In any case, the most free. He could not have expressed the significance to himself of this division into two. But intuitively he perceived within him the tonality of that imaginary autumn moment…

It was enough to close your eyes, put yourself in tune with the low sun gleaming in the yellow leaves; with the pure scent of the forest; with the limpid air… and you could pose the question, calm, disinterested: "But who is he, that little fellow dragging his lame leg along, pointing one shoulder toward the sky?"

Utkin loved to enter into that day which he had never seen, to dwell there amid the unknown trees with broad indented leaves, yellow and red, such as were not to be found in the taiga. To peer through this sun-drenched foliage at the little fellow as he limped along, his head bowed under the snow squalls…

The mystery of Utkin… The crux of it was that the huge triangle of ice that had suddenly become detached from the banks of the mighty river had left him enough time to realize what was happening. He had time to be aware of the gawking crowd, which drew back when they detected the ominous creaking; time to hear their shouts. And to be afraid. And to understand that he was afraid. And to try to save himself without making the human herd laugh at him as he jumped. And to realize that it was stupid to care about the laughter of the others. And to think: This is me, yes, this really is me; I am alone on this ice, which is breaking up, overturning into the flood; this is me; that's the sun; it is spring; I'm afraid.

Like a crystal that is marked with the incrustations of impurities, his grief would always retain this patina of feverish and banal thoughts. They would be engraved in the crystal, in its transparency of frozen tears.

The river was too powerful, its breathing was too slow, even at the moment of breakup, for the calamity to be sudden. The boy's eyes experienced it as if in slow motion. The man who risked being crushed by the ice himself and grabbed Utkin cried out cheerfully: "Just look at this drowned duckling! A bit further and he'd have gone in the drink… Look, he's a regular duckling!"

He went on, uttering little laughs, so as to hide his own fear and reassure the gawking crowd. Utkin, who at this moment was becoming Utkin the Duckling, was sitting on the snow, hunched into a damp ball. He looked at the man laughing and wiping his raw hands on his pants. He looked at him with his blurred eye, benefiting from the last moments before the pain swept over him. In an inexpressible premonition, he sensed that this laughter already belonged to quite another period of his life. Likewise the encouraging remarks from the onlookers, as they wondered whether an ambulance should be called or if the Duckling would recover unaided, after drying himself and drinking some hot tea. The sun, too, was a sun from other days. Like the beauty of the spring. And this nickname he had just been given – Utkin – had been given to a being who no longer existed: a boy like any other, who had come to look at the thaw on this very ordinary morning of his life…

And when, suddenly, the snow turned quite black, when the sun began to resonate and quiver and to penetrate into the burning mass that was his body, when the furrows of the first waves of pain began to lash his face, Utkin for the first time heard that distant voice: "But who is he, that little fellow shouting with pain, spitting up blood from his crushed lungs and twitching in the melted snow like a young bird with broken wings?"

The fact that the calamity had occurred without haste, in rhythm with the mighty river and the immensity of the ice blocks, impelled Utkin toward a reflection that was strange and very remote from any idea he had had as a child. He began to doubt the reality of everything that surrounded him. To doubt reality itself…

This doubt arose on the day when they took him home from the hospital. Utkin was sitting in the room in their izba, a very clean room filled with friendly objects, each of which evoked faint echoes of memory, a room that had the gentle tonality of his mother's presence. His mother brought a kettle from the kitchen, placed two cups on the table, made the tea. And Utkin already knew that his life would never again be the same. That from now on the world would come to meet him, mimicking the lunges of his limping gait. That the whirligig of his schoolfellows' games would always fling him away from the center toward the periphery, toward inaction. Toward exclusion. Toward nonexistence. He knew that his mother would always have that assumed intonation in her voice and that somber glint of despair in her eyes, which no tenderness would be able to hide.

Once more he recalled that slow-motion calamity – the weighty and majestic advance of the ice floes, their titanic collision, the deafening sound of the impact, the piling up of the enormous fragments, revealing blocks of a greenish transparency, more than a yard thick. With infallible precision, his memory played back the syncopated sequence of his thoughts. Standing on the triangle of ice, scrabbling to reach an impossible equilibrium, he was afraid of others laughing at him… And it was no doubt this fear of ridicule that made him clumsy…

Yes, it had all turned on so little. If he had been a trifle quicker, slightly less embarrassed by the stares of the crowd massed on the riverbank, things would not have changed. If he had drawn back from the water's edge by a couple of inches, the tea he was about to drink with his mother could have had quite a different taste, and the spring day outside the windows quite a different meaning. Yes, reality would not have changed.

Dumbfounded, he was discovering that the solid, visible world regulated by adults who knew everything was suddenly proving to be fragile, improbable. A couple of inches more, a few mocking looks received, and you find yourself in a quite different dimension. in another life. A life where the comrades of yesterday run away and leave you limping in the melting snow, where your mother makes a superhuman effort to smile, where little by little people get used to the fact that this is how you are, and fix you once and for all with this new appearance.

This universe, suddenly uncertain, terrified him. But sometimes, without being able to express it clearly, Utkin experienced a heady freedom when he thought about the discovery he had made. It was that all these people took the world seriously, convinced by its appearance. And only he knew that all it needed was a small thing to render this universe unrecognizable.

It was then that he began to make visits to that sunlit autumn that he had never lived through, among broad yellow leaves that he had never seen. He could not even tell how that day came to be born in him. But it was born. Utkin closed his eyes and breathed the strong, fresh scent of the foliage… From time to time an unpleasant whisper began to hiss in his head: "This day is not real, and the reality is that you are a cripple nobody wants to play with." Utkin did not know what to reply to this voice. Unconsciously he sensed that a reality that depended on a couple of inches and a few titters from gawking onlookers was more unreal than any dream. Not being able to say this, Utkin smiled and gazed with screwed-up eyes into the low sun of his autumn day. The air was translucent, the gossamer threads floated, swaying gently… And this beauty was his best argument.

And then one day – he was already thirteen, two years into his new life – his grandfather gave him a story to read. His grandfather, that taciturn and solitary polar bear, had been a journalist. His text, two and a half typewritten pages, bore the indelible stamp of the journalistic style, almost as tenacious as the letter k in his typescript, which always jumped up higher than the others. But Utkin did not even notice these details in the text, he was so overwhelmed by the story. And yet in this story there was nothing unusual.

Like a reporter in the country of his youth, his grandfather conjured up a column of soldiers lost in the mire somewhere on the roads of the war in the icy November rain. Their army beaten, scattered, retreating before the advance of the German divisions, seeking refuge closer to the heart of Russia… The bare forests, the dead villages, the mud…

"Each soldier carried within him the memory of some beloved face, but I had no one. No girlfriend: I believed I was ugly and was very shy. No fiancée: I was also very young. No parents: destiny had wanted it that way. No one I could think about. I was as alone as you can be under the low, gray sky. From time to time a farm cart overtook our column. A thin horse, a pile of trunks, several frightened faces. For them we were the soldiers of defeat. One day we met a farm wagon in open country. A rainy dusk, wind, the road churned up. I was walking behind the others. There was no longer any order in our ranks. A woman with a baby in her arms lifted her face as if to bid us good-bye. Her eyes met mine for a moment… Night fell and we were still marching. I did not yet know that I would remember for the rest of my life the look she gave me. In the war. Then in the camp for seven long years. And even today… Marching along in the dusk, I said to myself: 'At night to each of them comes a memory within him. And now I have the look she gave me.'… An illusion? A fantasy? Maybe… But thanks to that illusion I have come through hell. Yes, if I am alive, it is thanks to that look. That haven where the bullets could not touch me, where the boots of the guards bruising my ribs could not reach my heart…"

Utkin read and reread this tale, recounted it to himself several times. And one day, returning to his own simple story, he thought: But if what happened to me hadn't happened, I should never have understood what it meant, that look a soldier carried in his eyes all through the long night of the war…

Utkin was sure of his luminous autumn day. But a man was already awakening within this adolescent's body, within this frail, crippled shell. The world was exuding its sweet-tasting springtime poison, the mortal amber of love, the lava of female bodies. Utkin would have liked to take wing and join us, those of us who were already soaring in these intoxicating emanations. But his upthrust was shattered, his takeoff hurled him down toward the ground.

He was the same age as me, fourteen, during that memorable winter. At the time of his calamity and for some time afterward the female part of the school had paid a particular attention to him. The maternal instinct toward an injured child. But very soon his condition was accepted as normal, therefore of no interest. These little girls, from being future mothers who could love him as a sick doll, were turning into future fiancées. Utkin no longer interested them.

It was then that I began to intercept the look that he focused on my face: a mixture of jealousy, hatred, and despair. A silent but harrowing interrogation. And when, on the occasion of our swim, the two young women strangers observed us naked, Samurai and me, particularly me, through the dance of the flames, I understood that the intensity of this interrogation could one day be the death of Utkin.

But then came Belmondo… and as we went to see his film for the sixteenth time and Utkin emerged from the purplish shadow of the taiga, he took several steps toward me, regarding me with a dreamy smile, as if he had just awakened in the midst of this snowy plain lit by the mauve haze of the morning sun. And in his eyes I could find no unhealthy hostility. His faint smile seemed to be his response to the earlier interrogation. He waved his arm, gesturing at Samurai, who was pressing on a hundred yards ahead of us. He laughed softly: "What's got into him? Does he want to see more female spies than the rest of us?"

We speeded up a bit, to catch up with Samurai…

Yes, one day came Belmondo… And Utkin saw that his suffering and the interrogation that went unanswered had long since found classic expression in the Western World: the dreariness of so-called real life versus the pyrotechnics of fantasy; ordinary life and dreams. And Utkin fell in love with the poor slave to the typewriter. This was the Belmondo he felt close to. The one who climbed the stairs painfully, pumping his broken-winded lungs, ravaged by tobacco. In short, that very vulnerable being. Now hurt by his own son's boorishness; now by the unintended betrayal of his lovely young neighbor…

Yet it was enough for there to be a sheet of white paper in his machine, and reality was transfigured. The tropical night, thanks to the magic philter of its scents, made him strong; as swift as the bullets from his revolver; irresistible. And he never tired of moving back and forth between his two worlds, so as to unite them, in the end, with his titanic energy. The pages of typescript fluttered over the courtyard, and the lovely neighbor embraced this rather unheroic hero. In this happy ending Utkin saw a hope beyond words.

Now when he was climbing the high staircase at school, painfully dragging his foot, he pictured himself as that writer dogged by the misfortunes of daily life, that Belmondo of the rainy days. In the film, however, at the top of the staircase there was the pretty neighbor brimming with friendly concern. Whereas at school, in the passing throng of mocking faces, nobody was waiting for Utkin on the landing. "Life is stupid," a bitter voice said inside him, "stupid and cruel." "But there's always Belmondo," murmured another…

Halfway on our journey, in the midst of the highway, bathed in sunshine, we stopped to have a bite to eat. The wind blowing along the valley was bitter. We looked for shelter and settled ourselves under the lee of a snow dune shaped by the storm. The icy blast passed right over its sharp-edged cornice. The day seemed still, without the slightest movement of the air. Sunshine, the dazzling glitter of the snow, perfect calm. You would have said it was already spring. From time to time Utkin or I would lay a palm on the leather of Samurai's sheepskin coat. His short coat, dyed black, was hot. Our friend smiled: "Hey, I've got a real solar battery there, haven't I?"

We were through March; it was still fully winter. But we had never felt so intensely aware of the covert presence of spring. It was there. You simply had to know the places where it was hiding while waiting for its time to come.

The cold wind, a little food, and the hot light intoxicated us, plunged us into a blissful drowsiness… But suddenly a gust of wind broke over the cornice of the dune with a sharp hiss and scattered fine snow crystals across our provisions – hunks of buttered bread, hard-boiled eggs. It was time to finish the meal and move on. We put our snowshoes on again and climbed up the white slope, leaving our shelter behind. The icy blast sent long snakes of powder snow to meet us…

At sunset we lapsed into the stillness of the morning. We conversed less and less and were soon completely silent. Out of the bluish mist on the horizon the silhouette of the city was slowly beginning to appear. We were concentrating before the film…

It was in the course of this sixteenth journey that I became aware of an astonishing truth: we were each going to see a different Belmondo! And an hour later, in the darkness of the auditorium, I observed the faces of Utkin and Samurai discreetly. I believed I could understand why Utkin did not join in the audience's uproarious laughter when the gasping writer was struggling up the steep steps of the staircase. And why Samurai's face remained hard and closed when the preposterous publisher was approaching the chained beauty in order to remove one of her breasts…

12

As we were leaving after the performance we heard a voice in the crowd: "On Saturday they're showing it for the last time. Then that's it. Shall we come on Saturday?"

We stopped dead, all three of us, stunned. The cinema building, the trampled snow the black sky – suddenly everything seemed as if it had been turned upside down. Speechless, we rushed up to the great billboard, a canvas rectangle four yards by two, showing our hero's face surrounded by women, palm trees, and helicopters. Our eyes locked on the fateful date:

MUST END MARCH 19

When Utkin's grandfather saw our faces, his eyebrows shot up. "What's the matter with you?" he asked. "Have they finally killed off your Belmondo, is that it?"

We did not know what to say. Even in this great hospitable izba where one day the Western World had been born, we felt abandoned.

But life is like that: what we passionately desire often arrives in the guise of what we most dread.

On the day of our final rendezvous with Belmondo, March 19, the day that was going to mark a real end of the world, we saw a new poster! Both different from the previous one and similar, because animated by the brilliant smile and the sparkling eyes that we recognized from a long way off. And the painter must have been perfecting his art – Belmondo looked more alive, more relaxed. This time the shining face was surrounded by animals: gorillas, elephants, tigers…

First there was an explosion of wild joy: It's him, he is returning! Then a covert anxiety began to overtake us, a doubt began to gnaw at our fervent hearts: Would he be true to himself? True to us?

Yes, at first this new Belmondo struck us as a brazen impostor, like one of the false czars that Russian history is studded with. Like the false Dmitri or the false Peter III our history teacher had been telling us about… Our unease could not be shaken off. That seventeenth showing was to be one of great apprehension.

All through the film we were unconsciously waiting for a gesture from him, a wink. Or a prearranged remark that would have reassured us by testifying to the authenticity of the next film. We focused on him especially in the last scene: now he appears on the balcony, he smiles, he throws down the pages of the typescript… That was where we were hoping for a bridge, a link!

But Belmondo, his left hand resting on the waist of his lovely neighbor, now won over, remained imperturbable. He seemed to be calmly enjoying the suspense, which for us was real torture.

Coming out afterward, we looked again at the poster. Our hero's face, re-created with paint that was too fresh, too vivid, seemed to us artificial. For a long time we stared questioningly at his expression, by the pale light of a nocturnal streetlamp. Its mystery disturbed us…

On the day of the new film we remained silent throughout the journey. Without discussing it, we did not make our usual stopover to eat. Our hearts were not in it. And besides, the weather was not suitable. The frozen fog clung to our faces, stifled our rare words, obliterated the landmarks that guided us. Each of us felt the others to be tense, nervous.

In a little thicket at the edge of the city we took off our snow-shoes and hid them, as usual. We did not want to look like villagers. Above all, not in front of Belmondo.

It felt as if we had been waiting a good hour before the lights went down. And as for the newsreel, this time it seemed to last an eternity. We saw a cosmonaut, who looked like a phosphorescent ghost, swimming around his spacecraft with the slow movements of a sleepwalker. We felt we could hear the bottomless silence of space, which surrounded him. But the voice-over, in no way daunted by cosmic hush, announced with vibrant rhetoric: "Today, as all our people and all progressive humanity on the planet prepare to celebrate the one hundred and third birthday of the great Lenin, our cosmonauts, by taking this important step in the exploration of space, offer yet another infallible proof of the universal correctness of the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism…"

The voice went rumbling on in the infinite depths of the cosmos, while the shining phantom attached to the craft prepared to reenter the capsule. He advanced toward the door, which opened inch by inch with appalling slowness, just as if it were sinking into glutinous jelly in a nightmare. It was then that we became aware that we were not the only ones feverishly awaiting the new Belmondo. When the sleepwalking cosmonaut began to thrust his head through the door of the spacecraft and the commentary declared that this excursion into space demonstrated the incontestable superiority of socialism, we heard the furious exclamation of one irritated spectator: "For God's sake! Get on with it! Get back in!"

No, we were not alone in fearing the fraud of a false Belmondo. The whole audience at the Red October cinema was anxious about being betrayed…

From the first moments of the film, everyone forgot these doubts… His muscles stretched to the full, our hero was scaling the wall of a burning apartment building. At every moment, long flames risked setting fire to his black silk cape. And right at the top, on a narrow ledge, the heroine was uttering moans of distress, raising her eyes to heaven, ready to faint…

The hundred and third birthday, the excursion into space of the sleepwalking cosmonaut, the universal correctness of the doctrine – all that was instantly wiped out. The room froze: would he succeed in snatching the swooning beauty from the flames?

This was Belmondo, all right!

When the tension was at its height, when the whole of the Red October was breathing in time with the pace of the intrepid climb, when everyone's fingers were clinging to the armrests of the seats, in imitation of the fingers gripping the ledge on the top story, when Belmondo was hanging on thanks only to the magnetism of our gaze, the incredible occurred…

The camera performed a giddy zigzag, and we saw the apartment building stretched out flat on the floor of a film set. And Belmondo standing up, dusting off his cape… A director was haranguing him over some carelessness in his performance. His climb was just a trick! He had been crawling horizontally along a model where the windows were belching forth carefully controlled flames.

So everything was false! But he, he was more real than ever. He had admitted us into the cinema's holy of holies, its very kitchen, and allowed us to see the magic from the other side. So there were no limits to his confidence in us!

What this apartment building laid out on the ground represented was, in fact, the link we had dreamed of, a bit like the spy in the can of fish soup. A link to a world more real than that of the hundred and third birthday and the universal doctrines.

And as initiates into the ways of the West, we now followed Belmondo in his new adventure. Stepping over the windows and walls of the blazing apartment building, he walked out of the film studio.

We rediscovered the West. A world where people lived without worrying about the somber shadows cast by the sunlit mountain-tops. A world of deeds for the sake of the grand gesture. A world where bodies gloried in the power of their own carnal beauty. A world one could take seriously because it was not afraid to show its comic side.

But above all its language! It was a world where anything could be said. Where a word could be found for the most confused, the most murky reality: lover, rival, mistress, desire, affair… The amorphous, nameless reality that surrounded us began to structure itself, to classify itself, to reveal its logic. The Western World could read itself!

And, infatuated, we began to spell out the words of this fantastic universe…

This time Belmondo was a stuntman. Though still halfway illiterate in the language of the West, we nevertheless sensed in this role a powerful, stylish figure. A stuntman! A hero whose courage would always be attributed to someone else. Condemned always to remain in the shadows. To withdraw from the performance at the very moment when the heroine should be rewarding his bravery. Alas! The kiss was placed on the lips of his fortunate double, who had done nothing to deserve it…

In one instance this unrewarding role was particularly harsh. The stuntman had to fall several times from the top of a staircase to dodge a hail of bullets from an automatic rifle. The director, who possessed all the sadistic ways of the publisher in the previous film, made him repeat the exercise relentlessly. Climbing back up again became more and more painful, the fall more agonizing. And each time, a female voice yelled in tragicomic despair: "My God! They've killed him!"

But the hero got up after his terrible fall and announced: "No. I haven't yet smoked my last cigar!"

This Une, repeated four or five times, struck a surprising chord in the hearts of the spectators at the Red October cinema. Utkin and I thought at once of Samurai's cigars and those of his former idol in Havana. But the resonance of that exclamation went deeper. The line condensed within it what many of the spectators had been trying to express for a long time. "No, no," a good many of them wanted to say. "I haven't yet…" And they could not find the right words to explain that even after ten years in the camps, you could try to make a new start. That even though widowed since the war, you could still have hope. That even in the very depths of Siberia, spring still existed and that this year, make no mistake, there would be a spring bursting with joy and happy encounters.

"No. I haven't yet smoked my last cigar!"

The expression had been found.

And heaven knows how many inhabitants of Nerlug, at the blackest moments of their lives, have since then mentally formulated that response, as they gave themselves a wink of encouragement.

It was after that performance that, for the first time, we spent the night, not with Utkin's grandfather, but in a railroad car…

Samurai took us to the station at Nerlug, and there, striding across the rails, he headed for the farthest of the tracks, half covered with snow… We approached a train standing beside a patch of wasteland. Several trains were asleep in the sidings. Samurai seemed to know what he was looking for. Walking between two freight trains, he suddenly dived under a coach, signaling to us to follow…

We found ourselves in front of a passenger train with dark windows. The city, the sounds and the lights of the station, had vanished. Samurai took a fine steel rod from his pocket and inserted it into the lock. A faint click could be heard, the door opened…

An hour later we were comfortably installed in a compartment. There was no light, but the distant glow of a streetlamp and reflected light from the snow was enough for us. Samurai, who had lit the stove at the end of the corridor, brewed real tea for us – the only real tea there is, the kind they serve on trains on winter evenings. We spread out on the table all the provisions we had not eaten at noon. The scent of the fire and the tea floated into our compartment. The scent of long journeys across the empire… Later, stretched out on our berths, we talked about Belmondo for a long time. This time there were no shouts or big gestures. He was too close to us that evening for us to need to imitate him…

That night I dreamed about our hero's new companion. The ravishing stuntwoman. My sleep was transparent, like the snow that had started to fall outside the dark window. I woke frequently and fell asleep again a few moments later. She did not abandon me but settled for a few seconds in the compartment next door. My eyes filled with darkness, I sensed her silent presence behind the thin partition that separated us. I knew I must get up, go out into the corridor and wait for her there. I was sure of meeting her – it was she, the mysterious passenger on the Transsiberian. But each time this dream was ready to take shape, I heard the noise of a train going by on a track next to ours. I had the illusion that it was we who were flying through the night. I fell asleep. And she returned, she was there once more. Our coach hurtled westward. Braving the cold and the snow. Toward the Western World.

So it was not the end of the world. And Nerlug saw two or three more Belmondo films. As if, after a great time lag, these comedies had gone astray, been washed up by the flow of days onto some deserted shore, and waited for long years to come sailing along at last, one after the other.

Belmondo aged slightly, then grew younger again, changed partners, countries, continents, revolvers, degrees of suntan… But that seemed quite natural to us. We believed him to possess a very special kind of immortality, the most inspiring: one that allows you to journey through time – to backtrack or go forward to the brink of decline – only to enjoy the taste of youth more fully.

It was hardly surprising that this time-travel involved so many superb female bodies, so many torrid nights, so much sun and wind.

Belmondo settled in, established his headquarters at the Red October, just halfway between the squat building of the local militia and KGB and the Communard factory, where they manufactured the barbed wire that went to all the camps in that region of Siberia…

He occupied the large billboard, and what people noticed now as they walked along Lenin Avenue was neither the gray uniforms of the militiamen nor the giant skeins of barbed wire being taken away by trucks; it was his smile.

Without admitting it to themselves, the inhabitants of Nerlug were convinced that the authorities had committed an enormous blunder in allowing that man, with that smile, to move in on the avenue. Without being able to explain their intuition, they sensed that this smile was going to play a hell of a trick on the city authorities one day… For already, to their surprise, the filmgoers no longer shuddered at the sight of those gray uniforms, or felt any unease before the horrible trucks with their vile hedgehogs of steel. They saw that smile at the end of Lenin Avenue, next door to the cinema, and they smiled themselves, feeling a boost to their confidence amid the frozen fog.

And on the steps of the liquor store, for the first time in our lives, we witnessed not a brawl but an outburst of laughter… Yes, all those coarse men with ruddy faces were laughing uproariously: they were doubling up, not from the effects of blows smartly delivered to the solar plexus, but from merriment. They banged their thighs with their iron fists, they wiped away their tears, they swore; they laughed! And in their gestures, in their shouts, we recognized the latest Belmondo. He was there among those Siberians, those gold prospectors, those sable hunters, those loggers…

Once again the inhabitants passing the store said to themselves with secret glee: "You know, they were real idiots, those apparatchiks, sticking him up there on the avenue!"

Imperturbable, Belmondo smiled at us from afar.

In our dazzled infatuation we attributed every change to his presence. Everything was closely or distantly linked to him. Like the thunder and lightning at the beginning of April, in the still-wintry sky above the snow-covered city.

We heard a violent storm in the night, as we lay on the berths in our compartment after one performance. A flash froze our astonished faces. The thunder rumbled. We heard it through our dream-stuffed sleep. The motionless train seemed to be hurtling off on a journey in which a marvelous disarray of seasons, climates, and weather reigned. A tropical storm above the kingdom of the snows.

We were eager to go back to sleep, hoping for particularly sumptuous dreams. But what I saw on that trip turned out to be of an unexpected simplicity…

It was a little station, much more modest than the one at Nerlug, a house lost amid silent pine trees. A waiting room feebly ht by an invisible lamp. The muffled sound of a very few people, they, too, invisible, the stifled yawns of a railroad worker. The smell of a stove where birch logs were burning. And at the center of the room, in front of a timetable that showed only a few lines, a woman. She was attentively examining the arrival times, looking occasionally at the big clock on the wall. In my dream I sensed that for once her wait was not in vain, that someone was definitely coming any minute now. Coming on a strange train whose arrival was not announced on any timetable…

The night air, filled with the titillating smell of the storm, penetrated our sleeping coach. It was the freshness of the first breath of air that the traveler inhales as he steps down from the train, at night, in an unknown station where a woman waits for him…

13

One night we stumbled onto a brand-new train…

Yes, the coaches had not so far had passengers in them. The green paint was smooth and shining, and the enamel plaques sparkled like white china. The windows, perfectly transparent, seemed to reveal a deeper, more tempting interior. And this interior, with its smell of the virgin imitation leather of the berths, concentrated within itself the very quintessence of train journeys. Their spirit. Their soul. Their voluptuousness.

That evening Samurai did not light the stove. From his knapsack he took out a strange flat bottle and shone a flashlight on it. Then, setting an aluminum cup on the table, he poured himself several drops of a thick, brownish liquid and drank slowly, as if he wanted to appreciate fully its flavor.

"So what's that?" we asked, curious.

"It's a lot better than tea, believe me," he replied, smiling mysteriously. "Do you want a taste?"

"Only if you first say what it is!"

Samurai poured himself some more of the brown liquid and drank it, screwing up his eyes, then announced: "It's liqueur from the Kharg root. You remember? The one Utkin unearthed last summer…"

The drink had a flavor we did not manage to identify – or to connect with any dish we had ever tasted. An alcoholic taste that seemed to detach your mouth and your head from the rest of your body. Or rather to fill all the rest with a kind of luminous weightlessness.

"Olga told me," explained Samurai in a voice that was already floating in that aerial lightness. "It's not an aphrodisiac, it's just a euphoriant."

"Afro… what?" I asked, baffled by these unfamiliar syllables.

"Eupho… how much?" said Utkin, wide-eyed.

The very sound of the unknown words had something volatile and hazy about it…

We lay back on our new berths. Our heads were full of the scene from the film that had most fired our imaginations. It slid imperceptibly into our sleep, which was filled with erotic dreams worthy of the Kharg root…

In this scene Belmondo's ravishing companion, clad in a mere shadow of a brassiere and a trace of a G-string, snatched away a tablecloth, causing a huge vase with a sumptuous bouquet to fall from the table. And with wild abandon she proposed to our hero that they celebrate their carnal communion on this level playing field. The hero evaded the extravagant invitation. And we guessed that it was our own modesty he wanted to protect. The mere appearance of this bacchante was already producing very special vibrations within the walls of the Red October. Belmondo must have sensed that if he had given free rein to his desire, revolution would have been imminent in Nerlug. With the storming of the squat militia building and the destruction of the Communard barbed-wire factory. So he declined the proposition. But so as not to compromise his virility in the eyes of his audience, he suggested quite a different erotic battlefield.

"On the table? And why not standing up in a hammock? Or on skis?"

It is the measure of our love and, indeed, our confidence that this hypothesis was taken totally seriously! Yes, we had cast-iron faith in such a purely Western erotic performance. Two tanned bodies upright (!) in a hammock attached to the velvety trunks of palm trees. The thrust of their desire in direct proportion to the ecstatic unsteadiness beneath their feet. And the passion of their embraces increasing the violence of their rocking. Their fusion, in its profundity, would turn heaven and earth upside down. And those tropical night lovers would come to in the hollow of the hammock, in the cradle of love, whose swinging back and forth would gradually slow…

And as for love on skis, we were well equipped to picture the scene. Who better than we, who spent half our lives on snowshoes, could imagine the intense heat that fired up the body after two or three hours in motion? The lovers would cast aside their poles, the track would grow double, and all that could be heard would be the panting breath, the rhythmic crunching of the snow under the skis, and the cackling of an indiscreet magpie on the branch of a cedar tree…

However, we preferred the hammock, as more exotic. That evening we abandoned ourselves to its rocking, as we floated amid the vapors of the root of love. In our sleep we heard the rustling of the long palm leaves; we inhaled the nocturnal breath of the ocean. From time to time an overripe coconut fell onto the sand, a languorous wave spent itself beside our plaited sandals. And the sky, overloaded with tropical constellations, swayed to the rhythm of our desire…

We woke in the night and lay still for a long moment with our eyes open. None of us dared to confess his amazed intuition to the others. It felt as if the rocking of the hammock were continuing. At first we thought it was a train passing alongside our track and shaking us slightly… Finally Utkin, who was installed on the bottom berth, pressed his forehead against the dark window, trying to penetrate the gloom. And we heard his troubled exclamation: "Hey, where's it taking us?"

Our train was traveling at a brisk pace through the taiga. This was no mere shunting operation on the sidings at the station but speedy and regular progress in good earnest. Not the faintest glimmer of light was visible now: nothing but the impenetrable wall of the taiga and a strip of snow beside the track.

Samurai consulted his watch: it was five to two.

"What if we jumped?" I suggested, gripped by panic but already experiencing the surge of an exciting intoxication.

All three of us went toward the exit. Samurai opened the door. It was as if a frozen pine branch had come and lashed our faces, stopping our breath. It was the last cold of winter, its rearguard action. The needles of the wind and the powder snow. The endless darkness of the taiga… Samurai slammed the door.

"To jump out here would be throwing ourselves straight into the wolf's jaws. I bet we've been traveling for at least three hours. And at this speed… I know only one man who could do it," he added.

"Who's that?"

Samurai grinned and winked. "Belmondo!"

We laughed. Our fear faded. We went back to our compartment and decided to get off at the first stop, at the first inhabited place… Utkin took out a compass and, after minute adjustments, announced: "We're traveling east!"

We would have preferred the opposite direction. But did we have a choice?

The rocking of the coach quickly got the better of our heroic resistance to sleep. We all dozed off, picturing the same scene: Belmondo opens the coach's door, inspects the frozen night speeding past in a whirlwind of powder snow, and, stepping onto the footboard, hurls himself into the deep shadows of the taiga…

It was the silence and the perfect immobility that woke us. And also the luminous cold of the morning. We grabbed our shapkas and our bags and hurried toward the exit. But outside the door there was no trace of human habitation or of any human activity. Only the wooded flank of a hill, whose white summit was being slowly suffused with the brightness of the rising sun…

We remained at the open door, sniffing the air. It was not icy and dry, as at Svetlaya. It entered our lungs with a supple, caressing softness. You did not have to warm it in your mouth before inhaling it, like the harsh mouthfuls of wind at home. The snows stretching out before our eyes made us think of a strange permanent mild spell. And the forest climbing up the flank of the hill was also different from our taiga. In the lines of their branches the trees had a somewhat sinuous delicacy, a little mannered. It was as if they had been drawn in Chinese ink on a background of softened snow, by the hazy light of the rising sun. And around their trunks writhed the long snakes of lianas. It was the jungle, the tropical forest, suddenly frozen in snow…

All at once we saw orange among the trees… Yes, a patch of color like the fragments of bark scattered over the snow between the black trunks and branches. It was Samurai – he was far-sighted – who cried: "Look, it's a tiger!"

And as soon as the word was spoken, the fragments of bark assembled themselves into the body of a powerful cat.

"A Manchurian tiger," breathed Utkin with admiration.

The tiger was there, two hundred yards from the train, and seemed to be staring at us calmly. It probably crossed the track at this time every morning, and it must have been very surprised to see our spanking-new train upsetting its habits as master of the taiga.

The train moved off, and we thought we could discern the instant tension in the muscles of this royal body, ready to make a long leap to avoid danger…

There was no other stop until the end. We gave up worrying, for we realized that some time back, our journey had turned from a harmless escapade into a real adventure. We must live it as such. Maybe this crazy train would never stop…?

Utkin's compass was now indicating a southerly direction. The sky gradually clouded over, the outlines of the hills became blurred. And the taste of the breeze pouring in at the lowered window escaped all definition: tepid? humid? free? crazy?

Its singular tang became stronger, thicker. And as if the locomotive had finally wearied of struggling against this increasingly dense flux, as if the new coaches were becoming engulfed in this scented stream, the train slowed down, rolled along past some insignificant suburb, then beside a long platform, and finally stopped.

We stepped down from the train into the heart of an unknown city. With the instinct of savages, we followed an avenue that brimmed with the powerful breeze we had already detected in our coach. Now we wanted to reach its source. First came a cluster of ugly low buildings, warehouses with gaping doors, then the dark spires of the cranes…

And suddenly it was the end of the world!

The horizon vanished into soft mist. The land ended a few steps in front of us. The sky began at our feet.

We had stopped on the Pacific shore. It was its powerful breeze that had brought our train to a halt…

We had followed the same legendary route as the Cossacks of old. And, like them, we remained in silence for a long moment, inhaling the iodine scent of the seaweed, trying to grasp the inconceivable.

Now the point of our journey became clear to us. Unable to reach the Western World of our dreams, we had employed cunning. We had headed eastward, to the extreme limit. Yes, all the way to that Far East where the east and the west meet in the misty abyss of the ocean. Unconsciously we had employed the Asiatic trickery of Manchurian tigers: to outwit a hunter following their tracks, they move through the taiga in a great circle, until at a certain moment they are behind their pursuer…

It was thus that, pretending to run away from the unattainable West, we now found ourselves at its back.

We stretched our hands out into the waves lapping below the pebbles. The water had a harsh, salty taste. We laughed, licking our fingers…

Facing the immensity of the ocean, the city seemed almost small. It resembled all the medium-sized cities of the empire. Nerlug, for example: the same rows of prefabricated houses, the same street names – Lenin Avenue, October Square – the same slogans on strips of red calico. But there was also the port and the neighboring district…

It was here that the presence of the West could best be detected. First of all, the ships. With their great white masses, they towered over the bustle on the quays, the mountains of crates, the warehouse buildings. We tilted our heads back to read their names, to admire the fluttering of their many-colored pennants.

The crowd on the streets of the port bore no relation to the gloomy parade of faces that you encountered at Nerlug. The bright coats of the young, smiling women; the black jackets of the sailors, whose lively eyes, wearied by the misty desert wastes of the ocean, hungrily devoured the feast of things and people. From time to time one heard snatches of talk in a foreign language. We would turn. Sometimes we saw the face, with slanting eyes, of a Japanese; sometimes the blond beard of a Scandinavian. It is true that it was quite common to see billboards calling on the people to increase the productivity of their labor or to advance toward the final victory of communism. But here they carried no more weight than that of a splash of color in the panorama of the port district…

Among these women who walked bareheaded, these sailors dressed in short jackets and berets with black ribbons fluttering in the wind; among these foreigners with their light, elegant clothes, we felt like real extraterrestrials. Our sheepskin coats, our great tousled fur shapkas, and our thick felt boots showed that we came from the depths of the Siberian winter. But strangely, we did not feel any unease. We had sensed at once the hospitable character of these streets. They played host to people from the most exotic corners of the globe, people whom nothing could surprise. We walked along in the middle of the animated crowd, breathing in the iodine-scented wind of the mighty deep… And we were no longer ourselves!

We were our dream doubles: Lover, Warrior, Poet.

My gaze, like that of a sparrow hawk, intercepted on the wing the rapid glances of women thrown in our direction. Samurai advanced proudly, a light smile playing on his lips, a glint of tiredness in his eyes – a soldier after a temporary victory in an endless war. As for Utkin, he realized that for the first time nobody noticed the way he walked. For one could not proceed any other way in these streets: the wind threw open the front panels of the women's bright coats, flapped the sailors' broad pants, made foreigners reel. Utkin pointed his shoulder up at the sky, and it was very natural: all the passersby felt as if they were taking off, carried away by the Pacific wind. Furthermore, there was so much to see that we kept stopping all the time. Utkin already knew how to enjoy these pauses, where his limping gait disappeared… but in these streets it was pointless to hide it; quite the reverse: his injured foot became the token of a unique personal past in the theatrical melting pot of the crowd.

"It would be good to buy something to eat," the Poet finally dared to suggest.

"All I've got is fourteen kopecks," said the Lover. "A loaf of bread for three, that will be enough."

The Warrior was silent. Then, without explaining anything to us, he headed for one of the human whirlpools in the middle of the little square. We could see people exchanging packages, examining clothes, shoes. A dockside market. Samurai disappeared into the crowd for several minutes, then reappeared, smiling.

"We're going to eat lunch in a restaurant," he announced.

Questions were useless. We knew that Samurai had just sold his "rhinoceros," a gold nugget with a bump reminiscent of the animal's horn – a big nugget, the size of a thumbnail. He had always told us that he would save it for a special occasion…

The waiters looked at us uncertainly, no doubt wondering whether to throw us out or put up with us. Samurai's resolute air and his masterful tone overwhelmed them. They presented us with the menu.

At lunch we talked about Belmondo. Without mentioning his name, we referred to his adventures as if they had been experienced by close acquaintances of ours – or by ourselves. The conversation, somewhere between worldly gossip and a dialogue among secret agents, got under way.

"He was wrong to get himself involved in that business with the theft of the picture," began Samurai in an argumentative tone of voice, as he cut up his steak.

"Yes, especially in Venice!" elaborated Utkin, joining in the game with relish.

"Or at least he ought to have got rid of his mistress first," I added, with assumed indignation. "Because, let's face it, having a girl like that on your hands, stark naked and flaunting her fanny, with a husband as furious as a mad dog… for a spy, that's suicidal."

The occupants of the neighboring tables had fallen silent and were turning their heads our way. It was clear that our conversation intrigued them. The three waiters maintained their sullen and scornful expressions. They could not figure out if we were young farmworkers in a fit of delirium or three boy seamen who really had been around the world.

Finally one of them, the one most allergic to fantasies, came over and with a disagreeable grimace muttered: "Okay you kids, pay up quick, and back to school! Everyone's had enough of your idle stories."

We saw several curious smiles spreading over the faces at the neighboring tables. The trio we made was too unusual, even in this restaurant near the docks.

Samurai treated the waiter to a look of mocking indulgence and announced, raising his voice slightly, so as to be heard by everybody: "A little patience. I haven't yet smoked my last cigar!"

And in a leisurely fashion he took out an elegant tube of fine aluminum, from which he removed a real Havana cigar at least eight inches long. With a precise gesture, he cut off a little piece and lit it.

As he blew out the first cloud of aromatic smoke, he said to the petrified waiter: "You have forgotten to bring us an ashtray, young man…"

The effect was sensational. Those at the neighboring tables stubbed out their miserable little cigarettes; the waiters, dumbstruck, vanished into the kitchen. Samurai leaned back in his chair and began to savor his cigar, half closing his eyes, his gaze lost in a far-off dream world. From it Belmondo sent us his warm smile…

That is how we ate Samurai's gold "rhinoceros." He had sold it quickly and therefore cheaply. With the rubles left to him he paid for three third-class seats on a night train. Unreserved seats in a jam-packed coach, piled high with the ill-assorted luggage of travelers who demanded little with regard to comfort, whose humdrum faces and thick clothes were ht by a dim bulb in the ceiling. And that evening's news was broadcast by the radio built into the wall: "… in celebration of the seventieth anniversary… the Collective has decided to increase by eleven percent…"

The locomotive bellowed, and the tonality of its farewell cry gave us a final taste of the Pacific air's misty chill…

The passengers, for their part, uttered a sigh of relief- at last! – and began to take out of their bags provisions wrapped in paper spotted with patches of oil. The carriage was filled with the smell of roast chicken, smoked sausage, melted cheese. Unable to tolerate these alimentary emanations, we climbed all the way up onto the luggage racks. The buzz of all the conversations, muffled by the drumming of the wheels, floated right up to us. It was a nonstop flow, a mixture of everything: alarming anecdotes of legendary delays to this train caused by cataclysmic snowstorms; fears lest their frozen fish might start to melt and drip on their neighbors' coats; hunters' tales; tirades against the Japanese, "who are stripping our taiga bare"; and, of course, inevitable memories of the war, interspersed with the refrain "Mind you, things were better organized under Stalin."

Amid this cacophony, dulled by the thunder from the track, there filtered through clearly the voice of a man of small stature, ageless, a kind of Russified Chinese, whose round face had narrow fissures in it, dark and glistening, out of which his gaze shone. He was sitting in his corner, unremittingly telling stories linked to his life on the banks of the mighty river. His narratives led into one another and formed an epic saga addressed to heaven knows whom. At all events, it was he who proved to be the most resistant to the fatigue of the night. All the other passengers had long since fallen silent, wedged together on the hard benches, trying to find the best position between their neighbors' feet and elbows. But the tale told by the old Chinese was still not at an end. The monotonous and somehow childlike voice of this ageless man filled the darkness. "… It was already June, and suddenly the snow began to fall. I had potatoes: they froze. I had carrots: they froze. I had three apple trees: they froze. The river swelled even more. No fish. Then Nikolai said to me: 'In the city, at the game inspectorate, they're giving fifty rubles for every wolf you kill.' And I said to him: 'But first you have to kill it.' And he said: 'Well, those wolves, we're going to plant them.' And I said: 'How d'you mean, plant them?' 'Just like potatoes,' he says to me. And that's what he did. We went into the taiga and found their den. The mother wolf wasn't there. And in the hole, six little cubs. But the inspectorate doesn't give anything for little ones. So Nikolai fixed wire around their paws. And we left them. He said to me: 'That she-wolf will never abandon her young. And the wolves will grow. But they won't be able to walk.' In the autumn we went back. And Nikolai killed them all, with a club, so as not to waste cartridges. I helped him carry them to the cart and then bring them into town. At the inspectorate they gave him three hundred rubles. Nikolai bought eight bottles of vodka, to celebrate. And he drank too much; the doctor said he'd burned his stomach. And then we buried him, and with what was left of the money his wife ordered a good black granite headstone. But the workmen carrying it got drunk and…"

I could not bear to hear that voice anymore. I blocked my ears. But the story seemed to seep into my head without words – I could only too easily guess what came next, having heard so much of it. And they got drunk, and the stone fell and broke…

Unable to stand it any longer, I toppled down from my narrow plank and began hurrying along the corridor, blocked with luggage and the feet of sleeping passengers. I passed through two coaches similar to our own, filled with the same food smells and the same dull murmur of people crammed in and shaken about, as the passengers in the rear coaches always are. Then there were several second-class coaches, in which the passengers were asleep on berths and obstructing the narrow corridor with their feet, either bare or clad in thick woolen socks. One had to be nimble to avoid them… Finally I came to an empty corridor. The doors to all the compartments were closed. The passengers in this coach were already asleep…

I made my way along three or four more corridors, clean and deserted, redolent of toilet soap. I sensed that the goal of my journey was nigh… that mysterious sleeping-car dream car: the one in which a few rare Westerners traveled, venturing into the wild spaces of our fatherland.

I pushed open the door, I sniffed the air, and at that moment I saw her!

She was standing at the window in that narrow space between the long corridor and the platform by the exit doors. She was there, her gaze lost in the darkness of the Siberian night. She was smoking. A slender cigarette, very long and brown in color, which I instantly recognized as the feminine equivalent of Samurai's Havana cigar. A fur cape, light and gleaming, was thrown around her shoulders. Her face, seen in profile by the hazy light of this luxury coach, had nothing dazzling about it. Her delicate features were tinged with the serene pallor of return journeys…

I stopped short a few yards from her, as if I had come up against the invisible aura that her whole person radiated. I feasted my eyes on her… that hand holding the cigarette and slightly turning back a lapel of her cape; that foot clad in a short ankle boot, resting on a little ledge against the wall. Her knee beneath the dark transparency of her stocking fascinated me. That delicate knee allowed one to picture a leg that had none of the tanned roundness of the antelopes in our films. No, a slender and vigorous thigh with a fine, golden, velvety skin.

Young savage that I was, I sensed the intimate mystery of this face, this body. In my mind I could never have conceived of it. Nor even have described whom I had encountered. But the savor of her long cigarette and the gleam of her knee were enough for my intuition. As I looked at her, I sensed that her protective aura was slowly dissipating. And it seemed to me less and less impossible that I might hurl myself at this knee, kiss it, bite it, tear the stocking, thrust my unseeing face ever higher…

The nocturnal traveler must have suspected my agony. The ghost of a smile played over her face. She knew her aura was inviolable. To see this young barbarian a couple of steps from her, a savage dressed in a sheepskin and a shapka that smelled of wood smoke and cedar resin, amused her. But where has he come from, this young bear? she must have wondered, smiling. He looks as if he'd like to eat me…

The torture of my contemplation was becoming unbearable. The blood throbbed in my temples, and the words that echoed it were meaningless and yet said it all: "Western Woman! She's a Western Woman!… I have seen a real live Western Woman!"

It was then that the train slowed down and began to cross an interminable bridge. It was moving heavily along a track that had become more resonant. Huge steel crosspieces began to march past the window. I rushed to the exit door, I grasped the handle and pushed it violently. The force of the draft and the depth of the black abyss beneath my feet flung me backward.

We were crossing the river Amur.

The breakup that was taking place in its dark immensity was quite different from that symbolic procession of ice blocks that always accompanied the "raising of the revolutionary consciousness of the people" in propaganda films. Symbols like that disgusted us with their tawdry sterility: some aimlessly drifting intellectual contemplating the gutted ice on the river Neva and deciding to commit himself to the Revolution on the spot…

No, the Amur had no interest in contemplative intellectuals. It seemed to be motionless, so slow was its nocturnal gestation. What you saw was an expanse of snow opening up like gigantic eyelids. The black pupil – the water – appeared, expanded, became another sky, a sky upside down. It was a legendary dragon awakening, slowly shedding its old skin, its scales of ice, tearing them from its body. This worn skin, porous, with greenish fissures, formed into folds, broke, hurled fragments against the pillars of the bridge. You could hear the noise of the powerful impact as the current made the walls of the coach vibrate. The dragon uttered a long dull hiss, scraping up against the granite of the pillars, tearing away the smooth snow from the banks with its claws. And the wind carried in the mists of the Pacific – toward which the dragon's head was flowing – and the breath of the icy steppes, where its tail was still lost…

Gradually coming to myself again, I looked at the Western Woman. Her face impressed me with its complete calm. The spectacle, it seemed, amused her. Nothing more. As I observed her, I sensed, almost physically, that her transparent aura was much more impenetrable than I had believed. "It's the breakup on the river Amur," one could read on her lips. Yes, that night was labeled, understood, ready to be recounted.

Whereas I understood nothing! I did not understand where the titanic breathing of the river ended and my own respiration, my own life, began. I did not understand why the light on the knee of an unknown woman was such torture to me and why it tasted the same in my mouth as the mist saturated with marine smells. I did not understand how, knowing nothing about this woman, I could feel so intensely the velvety suppleness of her thighs, imagine their golden softness under my fingers, under my cheek, under my lips. Or why to possess this body hardly mattered once the secret of its golden warmth had been divined. And why spreading this warmth into the wild breath of the night already seemed to me to be an infinitely more vital prize…

I understood nothing. But unconsciously, I took delight in it…

The last pillars of the bridge marched by. The Amur vanished into the night. The Transsiberian entered the dense silence of the taiga.

I saw the nocturnal traveler stub out the rest of her cigarette in the ashtray fixed to the wall… Without closing the door, I began to hurry back through the coaches. I knew that I was returning to the East, Asia and the interminable tale of the ageless Chinese. A life where everything was both fortuitous and fated. Where death and pain were accepted with the resignation and the indifference of the grass on the steppes. Where a she-wolf brought food every night to her six little ones whose paws were bound with wire and watched them eat and sometimes uttered a long plaintive howl, as if she guessed that they would be killed and that their absurd deaths would shortly be followed by the death of their assassin, a cruel and absurd one as well. And no one could say why it happened like that, and only the monotonous saga in the depths of a crowded compartment could take account of this absurdity…

I walked along empty corridors and corridors where bare feet or feet in woolen socks stuck out; coaches filled with the heavy breathing and the groans of sleepers; and coaches buzzing with interminable stories of the war, of the camps, of the taiga – all those coaches that separated us from the Western World.

As I climbed onto the narrow plank of the luggage rack, I began to whisper in the darkness for the benefit of Samurai, who was stretched out opposite: "Asia, Samurai, Asia…"

A single word says it all. There's nothing we can do about it. Asia holds us with its infinite spaces; with the endlessness of its winters; and with this interminable saga that a Chinese, both Russified and mad – which comes to the same thing – continues to recount in his dark corner. This jam-packed coach is Asia. But I have seen a woman – a woman, Samurai! – at the other end of the train. Beyond the piles of dirty luggage and shopping bags dripping with melting fish; beyond the hundreds of bodies chewing over their wars and their camps. This woman, Samurai, was the Western World that Belmondo revealed to us. But you know, he forgot to tell us that you have to choose that coach once and for all: you cannot be here and there at the same time. The train is long, Samurai. And the Western Woman's coach had already crossed the Amur while we were still getting drunk from its wild winds…

I was tossing these random remarks into the darkness without even knowing if Samurai could hear me. I spoke of the Western Woman, the light on her knee beneath the transparent patina of a stocking, such as we had never seen on the legs of a woman. But the more I spoke of it, the more I sensed the shimmering singularity of my encounter with her slipping away… In the end I fell silent. And it was not Samurai but Utkin (we were lying head-to-foot on our luggage racks) who asked in a nervous whisper: "And us, where are we?"

Samurai's voice answered him, as if emerging from a long nocturnal meditation: "We are the pendulum… between the two. Russia is a pendulum."

"In other words, nowhere at all," muttered Utkin. "Neither one thing nor the other…"

Samurai sighed in the darkness, as he turned over onto his back, then he murmured: "You know, Duckling, to be neither one thing nor the other is also a destiny…"

I woke with a start. Utkin had nudged me with his foot in his sleep. Samurai was also asleep, with his long arm dangling in space. " Asia… the West…" So all that had been a dream. Utkin and Samurai knew nothing of my encounter. I derived a strange comfort from this: their Western World remained intact. And in his corner the Chinese was still mumbling: "… And this neighbor, when he came back from the war, married another one; he has three big children already; and his first wife, his fiancee, he forgot her long ago. But as for her, she waits for him every evening on the riverbank. She still hopes he will come back… Ever since the war she's been waiting for him… waiting for him… waiting for him…"