Once Upon The River Love

19

It is snowing on New York this evening. Or perhaps only on Brighton Beach, a Russian archipelago, where the white turbulence revives so many memories and inspires melancholy in the eyes of all those children of the defunct empire who end up here after arriving in the promised land.

We remain silent for a long moment as we walk along the boardwalk, beside the ocean. The smell of the wind – now a salt gust from the waves, now the piquant chill of the snowflakes – easily replaces words. The bitter cold of the night air evokes a whole sequence of past days that speak to us in profound, serious tones.

"I'm so sorry, but I just couldn't have come any earlier!" I finally say, in an effort to justify myself.

"It's all right. I understand!" Utkin hastens to reassure me. "When I saw him he was already breathing with difficulty; he could no longer speak. And yet when I looked into his eyes I had the feeling that he recognized me… No, no. I don't think they could have done anything, even here. His body was riddled with steel… Yes, I think Samurai recognized me."

He shows me a photo, brightly colored like a holiday snapshot. In front of the long mound of the grave, Utkin has been captured, involuntarily standing at attention. This is the Utkin of "twenty years later" with a little Trotsky-style goatee and eyes invisible behind his glasses. Beside him a woman crouches, seen from behind, piling up the earth around a plant with big purple flowers. Her very practical gestures make her astonishingly distant from, foreign to, the tortured gravity of Utkin's expression…

So does everything come down to this little mound of fresh earth lost somewhere beneath the skies of Central America…?

The dining room of the Russian restaurant, generally half empty, is well filled this evening. The Orthodox Easter. One can see the grizzled manes and noble brows of the first emigration, and some thin faces and embittered expressions from the latest wave; and plenty of Westerners, who have come to sample Slavic charm by candlelight. The musicians and the singer are not there at the moment – the obligatory intermission between two courses. Their repertoire matches the degree of intoxication. After the break come songs more in accord with the quantities of vodka consumed. Conversations become heated, remarks overlap, slowly spreading a confused hubbub across all the tables. And our host, the famous Sasha, like the conductor of an experimental orchestra, directs this cacophony, now coming over to this group, now to that one.

"Oh yes, Your Royal Highness. The only shashlik of this kind to be made in New York now is ours. After the death of Count Sheremetyev's chef… Yes, my good friend, this wine will help you forget your Moscow fallen into the hands of neo-Bolsheviks… Yes, of course, madam, this follows a purely Russian tradition. And furthermore, you'll see that it will go perfectly with this slightly acid punch…"

He seats us at one of the last free tables. I sit with my back to the room. Utkin stretches out his leg in the narrow space between the tables and lets himself down, facing me. The big mirror behind his chair transmits back to me the multicolored depths of the room filled with the vivid lights of the candles. On the walls hung with red velvet are the "icons" – pages from illustrated magazines cut out and stuck onto rectangles of plywood and covered in varnish. In one corner, on a cabinet, is a full-bellied samovar.

After the first vodka Utkin rummages in his great leather bag and brings out a colored volume reminiscent of a children's book.

"Since it's a time for confessions and faded dreams tonight…"

I open the volume, putting my glass aside. It is a comic book for adults. Quite "hard," from the look of it.

"These are my novels, Juan! Yes, all the plots are mine. The situations, the dialogue, the captions, everything… Impressive, huh?"

I leaf through the colored pages. With some variations, the stories are all similar: the characters are clothed at the beginning, undressed at the end. The backdrop for their nakedness is sometimes a lush tropical wilderness, sometimes the luxurious interior of a villa, on occasion even the weightlessness of a spacecraft… As the pages flick past, a whole firework display surges out of them: curvaceous backsides being grasped by the hands of hairy men; pink or tanned buttocks; genitals being flourished; hungry lips; luminous thighs. Suddenly I understand everything.

"So it was to write these that you made use of my love stories?"

Utkin looks sheepish. He pours us some vodka.

"Yes. But what could I do? You had so much experience. And I had to invent a new one every day!"

I turn over the very last pages of his book. I come upon a series of images that strike me as strangely familiar.

Utkin guesses what scene I have just discovered. He blushes, holds out his hand, and snatches the book from me, knocking over my glass. But I have time to take in the final sequence: the woman spread-eagled over the top of the grand piano, the man splitting her body in two and emitting roars in bubbles, like puffs of steam from a locomotive in a film cartoon…

We mop up the vodka. Utkin stammers excuses. The waiter brings us borscht and sets a vessel of piping-hot buckwheat kasha beside our plates.

"So you see, I've sunk pretty low," says my childhood friend, with an embarrassed smile.

"Not at all. In any case, as you probably guessed, my princess was pure invention. I lied to you, Utkin. That whole story. It wasn't the Côte d'Azur: it was the Crimea, a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. I no longer remember. And she wasn't wearing an evening gown the way she is in your pictures, just a faded satin sundress… Her body smelled of rocks baked in the hot sun. And as for the candelabra on the piano, I guess no one had lit the candles in them since the Revolution…"

We fall silent and stir fresh cream into our borscht.

"It's stupid. I should never have shown you my masterpiece," he says finally.

"Of course you should… Besides, the pictures are really good."

Utkin lowers his eyes. I see that my compliment has touched him.

"Thanks… It's my wife who did those pictures."

"You're married? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Well, I did tell you about her once… But we got married a month and a half ago. She's an American Indian… And she's a bit like me… That is to say – er – she's… she's a bit hunchbacked. She fell off a horse when she was little… But she's very beautiful."

I nod my head with conviction, in a hurry to say something: "So you've found your Eurasian roots?"

"Yes… Look, I think we're doing less harm with these comic strips than the people who sell all that kitsch that passes for literature in the States… And what's more, if you noticed, in my strips the bodies are always beautiful. My wife wants them to be like that…"

Utkin opens the book again above his plate and starts showing me the pictures.

"But the most important thing, you see, is that in each sequence there's a bit of horizon, a space, a panel of sky…"

I can't help laughing. "Do you really think your readers have time to notice that bit of sky?"

Utkin is silent. The waiter removes our plates and sets the shashlik before us. We drink our vodka. Sunk in thought, my friend raises his eyebrows, his gaze lost in the bottom of his glass. Suddenly he proclaims: "You know, Juan, the Americans often remind me of monkeys playing with a clockwork toy. They press a button, the spring functions, the little plastic man starts turning somersaults. The object is achieved… And it's the same in their culture. They construct a new genius and inflate him through TV, and nobody gives a shit about his books so long as the machine keeps working. Button – spring – and the little plastic man jumps around. Everyone's happy. It's very reassuring to be able to construct geniuses. With the help of the word… They juggle with ideas as old as the world, put them together in endless combinations, and sacrifice their own lives. Words, words, words…"

Utkin waves the empty bottle, signaling to the waiter.

"That's right. The life has gone, but the machine keeps working!" he adds, fixing me with his tipsy prophet's eyes. "And it's a great division of labor, you see! The masses get sustenance from products like my comics and the elite from unreadable word puzzles. And you've seen how solemnly they hand out their literary prizes! It's like Brezhnev pinning a new gold star on some decrepit member of the Politburo. Everybody knows who's going to get the prize and why, but they go on playing at Politburos. It's the deathly ivy closing in on the West. The ivy of words that has killed life."

At this moment I see the musicians appearing in the mirror behind Utkin's head. The violin utters a light experimental groan; the guitar emits a long guttural sigh; the accordion fills its lungs, whispering melodiously. Finally, still in the smoky reflection of the mirror, I see her… her.

In her black dress, she looks like a long bird's feather. Her face is pale, without a touch of makeup put on for local color.

Now, this machine, I think to myself, is really working well. Sasha knows just the right moment to serve up the Slavic charm… Their faces are softened by the abundance of food, their eyes misting over, their hearts melting…

But the song which arises does not seem to be playing Sasha's game. At first it is a very soft note, which immediately tempers the bravura of the musicians. A sound that seems to come from very far away and does not succeed in dominating the noise from the diners' tables. And if this frail voice imposes itself a few moments later, it is because everyone, despite drunkenness and a full stomach, can sense those distant snows unfolding, beyond the walls hung with red velvet and the paper icons. The voice is slightly raised; now the diners cannot take their eyes off the pale face, with its gaze lost in the mists of those days evoked by the song. In the illusory depths of the mirror I can probably see her better than the others. Her body a long black plume; her face without makeup, defenseless. She sings as if for herself; for that cold April night; for someone invisible. The way a woman sang one evening in front of the fire in a snowbound izba… Everyone knows the words by heart. Yet we find our way into that distant night, lost in a snowstorm, not by deciphering the words but by staring at the candle flame until it starts to grow bigger, letting you enter its transparent aura. And the music becomes the cool air of the izba, which smells of a snow squall; the radiant warmth of the fire; the scent of burning cedar; the limpid silence of solitude…

"That song," murmurs Utkin, "reminds me oddly of a story Samurai once told me. He was angry with himself for talking to me about the prisoners raped at the camp, and all that filth, even though I already knew about it. To him I was a child, and anyway, you know what Samurai was like… When the militiamen had gone off with the frozen prisoner and left us alone, Samurai pointed to his nose. You remember that boxer's nose he had? He told me how it happened."

That day, a thousand years ago, Samurai had gone to sleep on the roof of an abandoned barn near Kazhdai. The ground was still white, but the roof, under the spring sun, was shedding its last patches of melting snow. It was a woman's voice coming up from below that woke him. He looked down from the roof and saw three men setting upon a woman. She was struggling, but feebly – in our part of the world, as she well knew, slipping a knife between someone's ribs is easily done. From their shouts Samurai understood that it was not exactly a rape: the men simply did not want to pay. Otherwise she would have had nothing against it. In a word, she resigned herself… Samurai, tensed like a dog watching its prey observed them. The men uncovered only the parts of her body they were going to use: they bared her belly, uncovered her breasts, seized her chin, her mouth – they were going to need that. And all this in a hurry, panting, with dirty little laughs. Up there on the roof, nine feet above them, he was seeing for the first time in his life how a woman's body is prepared for "that."

The woman, split in two, closed her eyes. So as not to see… Dumbfounded, Samurai repressed an "Oh!" The woman had dropped her heart in the snow. No, it was doubtless a simple handkerchief or some small purchase wrapped in pale paper… It was a little pink parcel she was carrying in the inside pocket of the overcoat that the men had brutally ripped open at the collar… But for a moment Samurai thought he had seen a heart plunging into the snow. He began shouting and slid down from the roof, his face tortured by the evil that filled his eyes. He raised his arm-swords in the air and brought them down on the heads and ribs of his enemies. He crumpled under blows from fists as heavy as clubs. Then he got up again, wresting himself away from the hands that were trying to hold him fast. Suddenly blood flooded the sky. Blinded, he slashed with his swords, sometimes striking air, sometimes human flesh. But the blood that filled his eyes was slowly dissolving the sticky clot of evil… And when he was finally able to wipe his face with the sleeve of his jacket, he saw that the men were getting into a truck parked beside the road. And the woman, far away, very far away, was walking along beside the Olyei…

I listen to his story, and I believe I can recognize the Utkin of the old days. His face lights up. He is a heavy, corpulent man, but his gestures are once more reminiscent of the thrusts of a wounded bird trying to take flight from the earth. And it is in his old tones, grave and sorrowful, that he confides to me: "That woman, she was the red-haired prostitute who used to wait for the Transsiberian every evening. You remember?… The one I wrote my first poems to…

Utkin pours himself another glass, drinks it slowly. Has he even spoken? Or has that memory, buried beneath the snows, been born in my own fuddled head? And the blood flooding into Samurai's eyes, does it not have the warm smell of a forest in Central America? Samurai is stretched out at the foot of a tree, and what little vision he has left beneath the red flood conveys to him the image of two men in khaki approaching him cautiously. To finish him off. Yes, it is him that I see, his body riddled with metal, his smile defying the pain, true to the hero of our youth. To the one who taught us that bullets did not hurt and that death never came, so long as you looked it in the eye.

Stepping out of the heavy heat of the dining room, we pause for a moment on the boardwalk, before the somber expanse of the ocean. There is no light to be seen there. A dark infinity of water, snow, nothingness…

We end up at Georgi's, a tiny Georgian restaurant where life consists of long conversations with stray customers; views of the Black Sea on the walls; and the dreams of Kazbek, the old shepherd who welcomes us with his melancholy stare. Georgi greets us and brings us what he knows we need. Cognac, coffee, pieces of lime.

"In Tiflis a shell has destroyed my childhood home," he says softly, setting the bottle and the glasses on the table. "The world's going mad…"

We remain silent. We are seeing ourselves as we were twenty years earlier in the midst of an endless snow-covered plain… On the horizon the low sun of winter – that pendulum of history – was motionless, surrounded by watchtowers… We had then spent several years of our lives, Utkin, I, and so many others, stirring things up around that disk stuck in the barbed wire: writing our subversive books, debating, demonstrating. We pushed against its inert bulk with our shoulders – with our words! Gradually the pendulum of history had begun to respond to our efforts. It was swinging more and more freely, and now its movement back and forth across the immense empire was becoming threatening. One day that giddy swing had dragged us in its wake, flinging us beyond the frontiers of the empire onto the shores of our mythical Western World. And it was from these lands that we watched the pendulum gone crazy – or finally free? – demolishing the very empire itself… "And today, despite all my Western wisdom," I say to myself with a bitter smile, "I understand neither that frozen teardrop in the eye of the wolf they killed; nor the silent life beneath the bark of the ancient cedar tree that bears a great rusty nail in its trunk; nor the solitude of that red-haired woman, singing in front of the fire for someone invisible, in an izba entombed beneath the snow…" Utkin removes his glasses, and from the depths of his drunkenness he speaks slowly, focusing his blurred gaze on my face: "At the moment when I saw his name written in Roman script on the slab of his tomb – yes, his real name, not the 'Samurai' that we were so used to – well, at that moment I remembered everything. I remembered that day long ago, that walk with my grandfather on the banks of the Olyei… There was a path in the snow there, you remember. A narrow furrow that ran along the high ground beside the shore… I often tormented my grandfather with the embarrassing question: 'What do you have to do to write?' Maybe more that day than usual. I had just read his story about the war. And the silence of the taiga was more mysterious than ever. He replied with jokes or grinned and changed the subject. Finally, unable to stand it any more, he swore an oath and pushed my shoulder, playfully of course. I was up on the ridge, just near the icy slope that led down to the shore. I lost my balance and began sliding at full speed down that smooth strip. The sky revolved in front of my eyes; the wall of the taiga tumbled on top of me; I couldn't tell which was up and which was down. My body no longer had any weight – my fall had been so precipitous but at the same time gentle. Above all, I had this new sensation. Someone had pushed me as an equal, without worrying about my lame leg! I ended up down below, buried in a mass of snow amid some young pine trees. Dazzled and lighthearted, I looked around me. A few steps from my hillock, in the blue light of the winter evening, I saw them… Naked. A man and a woman. They were standing, close together, thigh pressed against thigh, their bodies entwined. They were gazing into each other's eyes without speaking. A perfect silence reigned. The purple sky above them… The smell of the snow and the pine resin… My mute presence… And these two bodies of an almost unreal beauty… My grandfather called me from the top of the ridge. His words rang out, breaking the silence. The two lovers unclasped each other and fled toward the little bathhouse izba… It was Samurai and a young woman I had never seen before and will never set eyes on again. As if she had been born in that moment of beauty and silence and vanished with it…"

Outside, the snow clings to our faces, reawakening feelings long since faded. Utkin turns up the collar of his overcoat to shield himself from the white flurries. His words mingle with the murmuring of the wind. I turn. Our footprints on the deserted boardwalk are reminiscent of those left by snowshoes along a railroad track in the midst of the taiga. As if Utkin were leading me toward a sleeping train on snow-covered rails… An empty coach, its windows covered in hoarfrost, is silently preparing for our nocturnal visit. Making ourselves at home in a dark compartment, we shall wait without stirring. He will come. He will walk up the corridor with his tired warrior's tread and appear in the doorway.

He will come! Weathered by the salt winds and the sun of all latitudes. Flushed with time tamed and space conquered. And he will call out in a voice still distant but smiling: "No. I haven't yet smoked my last cigar!"

And at that moment the train will slowly move off, and the stars of snow on the dark windows will leave increasingly oblique streaks. And in a long conversation that night we will learn her name, which cannot be spoken. She who was born one day in that moment of beauty and silence. Long ago by the river Amur.