Brief Loves That Live Forever (9 page)

My broken leg delayed my return to the village until the middle of May. Arriving there, I thought I must have stepped off the bus at the wrong stop. Instead of the little street leading to the river, a vast terrain, being turned over by bulldozers, extended all along the shore. No, I had not made a mistake for the factory was still there, its endless enclosing wall, the red letters on the roof, “an eternally living, creative, revolutionary doctrine” …

As for the village, all that was left of it was a single house, the one where an old woman lived whom we sometimes saw going to fetch water from the well. The only trace of the other houses was the wreckage of their timbers. The bulldozers were busy shifting these remains to the edge of the site. The roar of the engines, the acrid stench of their emissions, and, in particular, the pitiless, radiant sun, all this proclaimed the triumph of the life that forged ahead, with its promise of new happiness, victorious dynamism.

The waters had risen and the jetty was afloat several yards from the riverbank, like an island separated from this new life.

The other little island was that last house, which I went to in the evening after the noise of the demolition had ceased and the workers had gone home. The old woman who lived there did not wait to hear my questions. She understood at once why I had come. But what she told me added little to what I could already guess for myself.

There had been an accident at the factory a month earlier. Several workshops had been flattened in an explosion, becoming a mass grave for the prisoners who were brought in to work there from a nearby camp. No one knew the precise number of the victims but my friend’s father was probably among them. Or else it was the demolition site on the riverbank that had caused Elsa and her daughter’s sudden departure. In the previous year they had come to live in the village to be close to the factory where, for a few seconds, you could exchange glances with the prisoners as they passed through the chamber between the workshops and the freight wagons … With the village demolished, they had to move. So, after the explosion, Vika’s father might simply have been transferred to another workplace. The old woman hinted at this possibility, wanting to give hope a little chance.

Stunned, I did not have the presence of mind to ask her what she herself was going to do amid this chaos of overturned earth. I went away, vaguely thanking her the way a neighbor certain of seeing her again the next day might have done. Many years later that old woman, whom I left all alone on the little front steps of her doomed house, would inspire feelings of remorse such as recur throughout our lives and for which we never receive absolution.

It also took me many years to learn how to appreciate, beyond a brief episode of adolescent affection, the luminous happiness my friend and Elsa, her mother, had so discreetly afforded me. Of course, I remembered their hospitality, the gentleness with which they had surrounded the wild young lad that I was, a being hardened by roughness and violence. As I grew older I would come to recognize more fully that the peace they succeeded in causing to reign in such a desolate place, yes, that serenity indifferent to the ugliness and coarseness of the world, was a form of resistance, perhaps more effective than the dissident whisperings I later heard in intellectual circles in Moscow or Leningrad. Those women’s rebellion was not at all spectacular: keeping their little antiquated house perfectly neat and tidy, Vika’s always even-tempered serenity, never revealing her pain, Tchaikovsky’s
Seasons,
Elsa’s silence and her smile, while still shaken by her vigil among the women fighting to exchange glances with their husbands or sons.

I had to wait longer still before truly recognizing what this humble and precious gift was that I had received from them. The country of our youth has sunk without trace, carrying away with it, as it foundered, the substance of so many lives of which no vestige remains. That girl locating the tune we loved on a long-playing record, her mother thrusting a canvas bag into a prisoner’s hands, myself hobbling about in the mud on my broken leg … And a host of other lives, sufferings, hopes, griefs, promises. And the dream of an ideal city peopled by men and women who would no longer know hatred. And that “eternally living, creative, revolutionary doctrine,” it, too, carried away by the frenzy of time.

All that remains now is the March light, the heady exhalation from the snows beneath the sun’s dazzling rays, the wood of an old landing stage, its timbers warmed by a long day of sunshine. What remains is the pale patch of a dress on the front steps of a little wooden house. The gesture of a hand waving me good-bye. I walk on, drawing farther away, turning back after every five paces, and the hand is still visible in the mauve, luminous springtime dusk.

What remains is a fleeting paradise that lives on for all time, having no need of doctrines.

The moths flung themselves at every light source, collided with things, got scorched, fell, exhausted, regained their strength, hurtled back once more toward the white heat. In the face of this absurd obstinacy, one had to imagine a sublime sexual passion whose intensity made the risk of dying seem trifling.

Every evening during August that year we saw clouds of kamikaze insects bombarding the little lamps in the restaurants and the street-lights. And hordes of vacationers, seeking the heat of an embrace, the blindness of an affair, with a similar determination.

The awareness of being a part of this gave rise to ambiguous feelings in us: the joy of belonging to a bronzed, carefree tribe, hungry for love, and at the same time the disappointment of being just one more couple, a holiday romance, ephemeral and feverish, among so many others in that beach resort on the Black Sea …

This disagreeable feeling that we were imitating all the others was added to by our dependence on pleasure, like that induced by drugs. We had to increase the dosage, step up the frequency of our bouts of lovemaking. And our bodies would give way, exhausted, like those of the moths intoxicated with light. And every night we would be pained by this growing realization of a trite and bitter truth: pleasure only aims at itself, being a marvelous end in itself. A repetitive loop, heady, exhausting, delicious, perfumed with the scent of tanned and salty skin, molded by muscles made firm in lengthy daily swims, spiced with hot dishes and thick wine that tastes of walnuts, a panting flight toward the climax and a spiraling down into the abyss of bed linen saturated with sea spray, beneath a star hanging low among the branches of a pomegranate tree. An intoxicating cul-de-sac.

My companion during that August proved to be more aware than I of this circular dead end. Every night she watched the moths struggling against the suicidal impulse of their aerobatics … She was an Abkhazian, studying in Moscow and hoping, during her holidays, to experience an adventure essential to the life of a young woman of her origins: to free herself from the moral constraints of her Caucasian homeland, to love without falling in love. Yes, to be a moth fluttering amid a stream of light particles but without burning her wings. She had a name to match the best romantic scenario: Leonora …

Within a few days this project was accomplished: we met, free, passionate, each eager to offer the other the most attractive image of a physical relationship, to act out a fine drama of love. Our bodies performed superbly, the decor of mountains sloping down to the sea added a cinematic luster to every word, every kiss. We clasped one another with the energy of athletes, with a fierce yearning for perfection, just as if our every move were being projected onto an ever-changing screen of beautiful sunsets.

At that age one is loath to accept the brevity of pleasure. Still less, the blunting, the anodyne routine of it, ever more unsurprising, insipid. At the end of two weeks, our original thirst quenched, we had forebodings of a suffocating and vaguely matrimonial coziness.

All young lovers travel this road and all, in their alarm, have only one solution: to put pressure on the limits our poor human bodies impose on us. We doubled the violence of our embraces, seeking now the complicity of the sea at night, now the solitude of waterfalls in the forest. Following the consummation of our ecstasy, the waves would nonchalantly hurl back our entwined bodies onto the chill pebbles, turning us into gasping shipwreck victims. After lovemaking buoyed up by the sea, our walk over the stony beach to retrieve our clothes became torture. We hobbled blindly along in the darkness, groaning and limping, exiled from a paradise we believed in less and less. Or we would sally forth on a cool, misty morning for an amorous expedition upon a wooded hillside, only for it to conclude with a return in full sunlight, under the blaze of a pitiless sky, down a road where the molten asphalt was frankly reminiscent of hell.

One evening, as we emerged from the sea, we surprised another couple making love in the water. They located their clothes easily: the boy had a diver’s electric flashlight fastened to his waist … We had the strength to find this amusing.

At the end of the third week there was a day of rain, a dark sea, yes, black, to match its name, with the laughing sob of the seagulls, a prelude to the end of the vacation. We wandered in a park, went down to the beach, picturing our nocturnal swims with a shiver, then returned to the center of town. Everything we had lived through since we met was brimming with happiness and the scenario we had written with our bodies was a palpable success. Yet we could not manage to conceal from one another a feeling of frustration. Our affair was like one of those concertinas of holiday postcards displayed under the noses of tourists. It led to nothing beyond sun-soaked clichés.

In short, it did not lead to love. That day, without admitting it, we sensed what we lacked.

Not having the courage to recognize this, we started looking for someone to blame. And the villain was very quickly unmasked!

The obstacle to our love was right there in front of us, depicted on a vast billboard that ornamented the train station’s facade. An imposing face, an authoritarian gaze beneath bushy eyebrows. A fine man, in short, with a slightly receding hairline and a solid chin, sporting four gold stars on his black jacket …

Today his name could serve as a marker for the generations: those who have grown up since the fall of the Berlin Wall will not even remember a certain Brezhnev, images of whom once decorated one-sixth of the globe. And even in this seaside town he was everywhere to be seen: alongside roads, on the walls of holiday homes, at the central point in the big park where all the pathways met … Forgotten nowadays, this old potentate then presided over the destinies of a vast empire, governing the lives of hundreds of millions of people, unleashing wars at all four corners of the earth. A man whose slightest frown would cause barrels of ink to flow in newspapers across the planet …

Lifting our umbrella a little, we met his gaze and sighed, recognizing with resignation: yes, he was the guilty one. And, beyond him, the regime that held sway in our country and of which he was the deified incarnation.

What did those lovers pacing up and down in the driving rain need? Not much, in the end. The chance to rent a hotel room and create a little summer vacation love nest where they could feel at home. But in that era hotels were few in number and imposed identity checks more rigorously than the police. If an unmarried couple had dared to present themselves at the reception desk, they would have been suspected of madness.

The status of free lovers was on a par with that of vagabonds, thieves, dissidents. Which was not mistaken: love is in essence subversive. Totalitarianism, even in the mild form our generation knew, dreaded the spectacle of two beings embracing and escaping its control. It was less the prudishness of a moral order than the nervous tic of a secret police, refusing to admit that a tiny part of existence can lay claim to its personal mystery. A hotel room became a dangerous place: the laws of the totalitarian world were flouted there by the pleasure two people gave one another, with scant regard for the decisions of the latest Party Congress.

In these circumstances there was only one means of finding accommodation: the “private sector,” as this relic of bourgeois life was then called. Little houses into which the owners struggled to cram an extravagant number of vacationers. Every room, every nook and cranny, the tiniest shed, was packed with beds in which families and couples, as well as people on their own who had come to the seaside to relieve their loneliness, all slept in a tribal lack of privacy. Inviting a person into such a wigwam was not, in principle, impossible. But to avoid the righteous anger of respectable mothers, the carnal act had to proceed at the slow tempo of those silent gyrations cosmonauts perform in orbit. At the first creak of the bed, the lovers would freeze, waiting for the neighboring snores to resume their rhythm. To put it mildly, the ponderous nature of this Kama Sutra did not go hand in hand with the full flowering of sexuality. We had dared to try it once, Leonora and I. We never repeated the experience. Hence our choices of the sea and the forest and a return every night to our respective vacation accommodations.