Andreï Makine: Brief Loves That Live Forever

All I learned about that bruised life was limited to this tally of three convictions and a few rare details of his daily life as prisoner … And also the nickname “Poet,” which his fellow prisoners had given him, though I did not know if its implication was disparaging or approving. That was all. Ress made it a point of honor not to talk about his sufferings.

The only long conversation we had took place in a city in northern Russia six hundred miles from Moscow, the place of residence assigned to him during the last six months of his life.

It was May Day. I was walking home with him and we had to wait for a while at the entrance to a bridge, closed off on account of the parade taking place on the main square. Leaning on the rail, we could see the procession advancing past an immense building, the local Party headquarters. On the grandstand’s terraces stood rows of black overcoats and felt hats.

The day was sunny but icy and windy. Bursts of military marches were borne on the breeze, snatches of slogans flung out by the loudspeakers, the dull roar from the columns of participants as they repeated these official watchwords at the tops of their voices.

“Just picture it! The very same spectacle all the way from the Far East to the Polish frontier,” Ress murmured, in the dreamy tones one adopts when conjuring up a fabled land. “And from the Arctic Ocean to the deserts of central Asia. The same grandstands, the same pigs in felt hats, the same crowd stupefied by this charade. The same parade stretching for thousands and thousands of miles …”

The notion was striking, I had never thought about this human tide, sweeping in relays from one time zone to the next (eleven in all!) across the vast territory of the country. Yes, in every town, in every latitude, the same collectivist religious celebration.

Sensing my perplexity, he hastened to add, “And, believe me, it’s the same in the camps! The top-ranking camp guards lined up on a platform, a band made up of musical ex-convicts, red banners: ‘Glory,’ ‘Long Live,’ ‘Forward!’ Everywhere, I tell you. One day they’ll fly those grandstands up to the moon …”

Echoing his words, a gust of wind spat out, “Long live the heroic vanguard of the working class! …” Ress gave a tight-lipped smile over a toothless mouth.

“Oh those grandstands! … In the West they’ve written critical commentaries by the ton to explain this society of ours, the hierarchy, the mental enslavement undergone by the populace … And they still don’t get it! While if you’re here, all you have to do is open your eyes. You can see the chief apparatchik from here, at the center of the platform, a black hat and that face, flat as a pancake. Around him, with meticulous concern for the ranking order, his henchmen. The farther they are from him, the less important they are. Logical. The supreme example is the official platform in Red Square. A few soldiers, so the people know what power upholds the Party’s authority. And most interesting of all: the enclosures that divide the platform into sectors. In the one on the right are the heads of state enterprises, the river port administration, a few high-ranking trade unionists, and, lest the proletarians be forgotten, three or four shock workers. In a nutshell, the cream of the forces of production. And as for the less productive forces, but ones still useful to the regime, they put them on the left. Heads of universities, editors of local newspapers, bigwigs from the world of medicine, a couple of scribblers, in a word, the intelligentsia. And immediately beneath the central podium, the family enclosure where the wives and children are deposited …”

He was overcome by a fit of coughing, leaned forward, and a thick blue vein swelled on his temple, very prominent beneath the transparent skin of his cranium. I sought to steer the conversation in another direction.

“Fine. But, you know, the people don’t really care about those grandstands …”

He stood up straight and his eyes burned into me.

“Wrong! The people do care about them. They need them! This pyramid of pigs’ heads is essential to them as the coherent expression of the world’s architecture. The way the enclosures are arranged reassures them. It’s their lay religion. And that idiot bellowing slogans into the loudspeaker is the precise equivalent of a priest preaching his sermon …”

He managed to hold in check another coughing fit, his neck trembled, his face turned purple. His voice came out in bursts, wary of the spasms clutching at his throat.

“We shouldn’t generalize … They’re not all the same … these demonstrators. You could say there are … three groups. The first, the overwhelming majority, are a docile mass who like the comfort of the herd. The second category is made up of cynics, mainly from the intelligentsia: they chorus the slogans, but when they chant it’s all a game, it’s a joke. They wave their flags in ironic frenzy. They brandish the leaders’ portraits on their poles as if they were heads held aloft on pikes. The third and last category is that of the rebels, naive enough to hope they can disrupt this grotesque parade. They write pamphlets, make posters, and … and …”

He began coughing again, one hand covering his mouth, the other seizing the parapet of the bridge. His thin body’s bent shape, clad in an old raincoat, was reminiscent of a broken branch … The path had just been reopened, the parade was coming to an end, the crowd could be seen dispersing into the neighboring streets.

We continued our walk, but instead of going toward his home, Ress led me into a residential quarter of the Stalin era: a park surrounded by a rectangle of apartment buildings where lived the notables we had just seen on the grandstand. He stopped beside the cast-iron fence to catch his breath, watching the demonstrators on their way home, glad to be finished with the chore of compulsory participation. A young man carrying the portrait of a member of the Politburo over his shoulder. Three adolescent girls, each with a rolled-up banner tucked under her arm. A group of schoolboys …

And suddenly, stepping out of a black official car, an attractive woman in her forties, dressed in a pale coat, holding a little boy’s hand. The child stared at us in astonishment, the presence of these two men, so unalike, must have appeared strange to him. The mother tugged at his hand, and they passed within a few yards of us before going into one of the “Stalinesque” apartment buildings. I caught a trace of perfume, subtly bitter, in harmony with that cool, luminous day. Ress turned away, coughing again, but without choking. For a moment it even seemed as if he were trying to spare the child the spectacle of his discomfort …

We set off again without my understanding why he had wanted to go via the park. Perhaps, simply, so as to emerge onto the main square, now almost empty … He nodded his head slightly in the direction of the grandstand. His voice now had a joyful ring.

“A science fiction scenario. Tomorrow this rotten regime falls apart. We find ourselves in the capitalist paradise and the people who step up onto this grandstand are millionaires, film stars, suntanned politicians … And in the intellectuals’ enclosure, let’s say, Jean-Paul Sartre … No, he’s just died. Well, they’ll find someone. And do you know what the funniest part of it is? The crowd will parade past just the same. You see, they don’t care who fills the grandstand. What matters is for it to be filled. That’s what gives meaning to the lives of our human ant heap. Yes, instead of the statue of Lenin, you’d have to picture a playboy in a tuxedo. It’ll happen one day. And once again there’ll be those three categories in the parade: placid sleepwalkers, very much in the majority, some cynics, and a few marginal rebels …”