Andreï Makine: Brief Loves That Live Forever

“He died a week later,” Pyotr tells me now.

“So that was his very last encounter,” I murmur, echoing his words, “with the woman he loved …”

Pyotr nods, but with a hesitant air, as if the chronology of this love affair were beyond the simple logic of men. Then he continues his story.

On that last occasion Ress had asked him to take him as far as the river. And on the bank he took off his shapka, drew himself up to his full height, exposing his face to the wind’s icy blast. He stood there, motionless, his gaze lost in what lay beyond the waters, with an expression Pyotr had never seen on him before. Hard, proud, victorious. Then a distant smile softened his face, he began breathing deeply …

Pyotr turns toward the private room. The stout woman is framed in the doorway, and it looks as if her entourage, which consists of several people, is carrying her, supported under her elbows.

“Oh, excuse me,” he stammers. “I have to get going now …”

“So soon? But, hold on. What’s going on? It’s not late, we can stay a bit longer …”

“The thing is … I work for those people. Guide, interpreter, bodyguard, chauffeur. In a word, I’m their servant. I’m very sorry … I’ll try to call you tomorrow …”

He moves away, slips ahead of the Russian dinner guests, holds the door for them … Through the window I can see him opening the limousine doors. In fact a whole convoy departs: this huge luxury car plus two other vehicles, one preceding it, the other bringing up the rear …

The room in the restaurant is almost empty, night has fallen, and Pyotr Glebov’s story comes back to me as vividly as an experience remembered.

Ress stands facing the cold expanse of the river. The wind sets a fine tuft of white hair on the top of his head dancing. The November squalls are powerful, icy; they strike him in the chest, making him teeter. But he stands his ground, stares at the horizon with his toothless mouth stretched in a painful smile.

For he has won! The regime that has ravaged his life is beginning to show signs of decrepitude, is on the brink of collapse.

Very quickly, however, his hard grimace fades into a detached, almost tender expression. He knows that in this duel with History there can be no victor. Regimes change. What remains unchanged is men’s desire to possess, to crush their fellow men, to lapse into the numb indifference of well-fed animals.

He smiles, breathes in deeply, and the breath he inhales is mingled with the river’s snowy chill, the smoke from a fire burning in one of the shacks that cling to the shore. And a bitter tang of perfume …

“A man who’s never been loved …” I used to say to myself when thinking about Ress. Even God was no help, for such were the laws of his Creation, based upon hatred, destruction, death. Above all, based upon time, which can transform an adored girl into a stout, heavy woman with a coarsely made-up face, like a pig. No, if God had to confront this world without love, he would be powerless.

And it is this human wraith, this Ress, teetering on the brink of nothingness, yes, he alone who has had the strength to cause the beauty of the woman he loved to live forever.

At the time of our meeting, almost thirty years ago, these were the solemn words I believed were needed to sum up Dmitri Ress’s life: a revolt against a world in which hatred is the rule and love a strange anomaly. And the failure of God, whose Creation man is called upon to set to rights …

I now remember that at the moment when we left the little street where we had paused, looking out over the river, Ress had confided to me with a rueful smile, “They used to call me ‘Poet,’ my comrades at the camp. If only it were true! I should know how to speak of the joy and light I find everywhere nowadays. Speak of a moment like this, yes, with the last of the snow falling, the scent of a wood fire, and the lamp that has just been lit in that little gray window over there, do you see it?”

I am convinced now that these words expressed, better than anything, what Ress’s life allowed us to perceive. Far beyond all doctrines.

For that day, perhaps without his knowing it, it was the poet in him who spoke.

ANDREÏ MAKINE was born in Siberia in 1957 and has lived in France since 1987. His fourth novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers (Le testament français), won both of France’s top literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. Makine’s most recent novels, The Life of an Unknown Man, Brief Loves That Live Forever, and A Woman Loved are all available from Graywolf Press.

GEOFFREY STRACHAN was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 1998 for his translation of Le testament français. He has translated all of Andreï Makine’s novels for publication in Britain and the United States.