Andreï Makine - Brief Loves That Live Forever

Conviction, camp, release, fresh acts of “anti-Soviet propaganda,” another conviction, each time a longer sentence in a camp with an even harsher regime. And, two decades later, the outcome of this unequal struggle, a man of forty-four who looked like an eighty-year-old, a toothless grimace, lungs ravaged by cancer, a shaking body that the wind seemed to cut right through …

I recall our slow stroll through a big city in a festive mood. The conversation we had, held up on a bridge, as we watched the May Day parade in the distance, lines of people and red flags flooding the city’s main square. The devastating coughing fits that overcame Ress, the fiery gaze he directed at the world, the vigor of his words, incredible, given his extreme frailty. And then a brief pause beside a park, Ress turning away as a woman passed by with a child. An attractive woman emerging from an official car, walking beside the park fence, disappearing into an apartment building’s entrance. And leaving us with a fleeting trace of bitter perfume …

Pyotr Glebov’s story finally fills in the gaps in what I knew about Ress’s life. The woman who has just gone back into a private room in the restaurant is the boyhood sweetheart, the only love, of that indomitable man.

At the age of twenty-two, intoxicated with illicit literature and revolutionary plans, they launch their bill-posting campaign. Important details: it is the young woman who suggests the subject of the “Great Pork Harvest.” At first she is much more militant than he; he is a thoughtful student, immersed in the study of Marx. For, strictly speaking, he is not anti-Soviet. Very soon he senses that all societies produce creatures of the same type: ones that, with zoological predictability, can think only of feeding themselves, reproducing themselves, and yielding to the power of a state that shackles them into mind-destroying tasks, stuns them with substitutes for culture, has them kill one another in wars. Indeed, in his early days, he is more of a freethinker drawn to anarchism. But the poster itself is clearly an attack on the prevailing regime. They put it up at night: a libertarian ecstasy, followed by long hours of love, dreams, pledges. And the memory of those November days will never fade, the fluttering of the first snowflakes, the muted air that smells of wood fires, a heady chill announcing the start of a new life, the promise of a quite different world.

Identifying the culprits is child’s play for the police. Traces of paint, a vigilant neighbor …

During the interrogration, Ress takes everything on himself. His girlfriend suddenly sobers up, realizing that things are getting serious, bursts into tears, denies all responsibility, lies, sobs, is delirious, begs for pardon. She has highly placed parents, Ress only has his mother, a woman of doubtful reputation, having herself spent time in prison under Stalin … The young man gets three years, a merciful sentence intended to give him a chance to return to the straight and narrow. His ladylove settles down. After believing you could play hide-and-seek with the regime, she has just glimpsed the workings of the heavy mechanism of repression. From now on she has only one desire: to forget the errors of her youth, to go back to being a pretty student from a good family, carefree, unoriginal, and, very soon, a happy wife and mother.

In the camp Ress comes to realize how much his surmises as a rebellious youth were justified. He discovers a whole world of ruined lives. Men crushed day after day by the prison machinery as it turns them into wrecks beyond repair. And the man who managed to cross all the lines of barbed wire one night and was shot down at the last of them. Ress now knows his life will be dedicated to the fight against the bullets that make mincemeat of a prisoner caught in the last line of barbed wire.

The regime does not kill him, for we are no longer in the days of Stalin. With quiet, bureaucratic indolence, it inflicts a slow death on him: trial, conviction, release, fresh trial …

Throughout all these years the love Ress carries within him follows the paradoxical logic of those who worship calmly, without hope, free of any mind games. No connection between the former lovers is possible now. The woman is married, in the bosom of a family, she lives on another planet, inaccessible to a prisoner who has just been released and will be back in a camp before long. But dreaming of her is vital to him. If he lost this hope, his struggle would become the mere obstinacy of an embittered man, which is how the judges think of him.

His own existence is of little concern to him: released, he finds work, anything to keep body and soul together, and the rest of the time he reads and writes, accumulating, without a second thought, the incriminating elements for his next conviction. From time to time a woman gives him shelter, hoping to divert him from the course he has set himself. As soon as he senses the danger of such a diversion, he leaves, lives in train stations, in abandoned railroad cars. These “inconveniences,” as he calls them, with a smile, seem to him external to what matters. His only aim is to arouse his fellow beings from their numb, piglike composure, to share with them the certainty of a world freed of its flaws, the robust faith with which he is now filled.

He becomes increasingly convinced that his former girlfriend initiated him into this quest for truth. That even in her absence, she still gives him the strength to continue his fight. So they are ever united, as in their youth … One of his judges, less insensitive than the rest, refers to this dissident so eager to save humanity as having psychological problems, hoping thus to spare him another spell of hard labor. Ress demands that they name any work by Karl Marx, saying he is ready to summarize the contents in order to demonstrate his perfect sanity. The lawyers are embarrassed. He feels sorry for them: “They’re forcing you to declare that anyone who thinks mankind deserves better than a pig’s fate is mad.”

Tossed from one prison to another, from one haven to the next, Ress at last finds a place of anchorage on his tormented road. During his periods of liberty he comes to the city where his former girlfriend lives and where, twice a year, he is sure to be able to see her go by: on May Day and at the celebration of the October Revolution. He knows that, as the wife of one of the city’s leaders, she is present at the parades and immediately afterward goes home to prepare the celebratory meal.

He does not try to speak to her. What matters to him is to watch her go by, close to him, immersed in a life he could have led. What makes him happy, above all, is to feel no regret at the idea of having been exiled from this mild routine of human life.

As time passes, remaining unseen becomes difficult. The violence of his cough gives him away, his gaunt physique and his clothes render him suspect in this residential enclave where the city’s dignitaries live. One day, after the May Day parade, his beloved’s child notices the odd presence of a vagrant shaken by a coughing fit …

That day I was with him on his pilgrimage. Ress turned away, clapping a hand to his mouth. The woman moved on, suspecting nothing.

Six months later it was Pyotr Glebov who helped Ress to keep his rendezvous. It was the October Revolution celebrations … The parade had finished, a car set down an attractive woman dressed in a long, pale overcoat, who strolled beside the park railings with a dreamy air, passing two men stationed there in a bizarre vigil beneath a fine autumn drizzle. A tall fellow with broad shoulders and a comically thin old man, who was coughing, doubled up, with his eyes half closed. She moved on, leaving them with a momentary tremor of perfume: followed by her son, she went into the apartment building, where the caretaker eyed the two men reprovingly from the doorstep.