Andreï Makine: Brief Loves That Live Forever

Andreï Makine was born and brought up in Russia, but Brief Loves That Live Forever, like his other novels, was written in French. The book is set mainly in Russia, but also in France, and the author uses some Russian words in the French text that I have retained in this English translation. These include shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with earflaps), izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs), kolkhoz (a collective farm in the former Soviet Union), Komsomol (the Soviet Communist League of Youth), apparatchik (a member of the Soviet Communist Party administration, or apparat ), nomenklatura (the public positions filled by Party appointees), gulag (the system of Soviet corrective labor camps), and samizdat (the clandestine publication of texts banned in the Soviet Union and also the texts themselves).

Other Russian historical references include the famous Nevsky Prospekt, one of the main streets in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), and “Potemkin villages,” sham villages reputedly built for Catherine the Great’s tour of the Crimea in 1787 on the orders of her chief minister, Potemkin. The writer Varlam Shalamov was in the Kolyma gulag in the far north of the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1951. His stories of life there were published in English as Kolyma Tales. As a result of calendar changes, the date when the October Revolution was celebrated throughout the Soviet Union was November 7. “Shock workers” were members of “shock brigades,” bodies of (especially voluntary) workers who took on particularly arduous tasks.

I am indebted to many people, including the author, for advice, assistance, and encouragement in the preparation of this translation. To all of them my thanks are due, notably: Thompson Bradley, Mary Byers, Ludmilla Checkley, June Elks, Geoffrey Ellis, Julian Evans, Mary Rose Goodwin, Scott Grant, Martyn Haxworth, Andrew Lawson, Catherine Merridale, Pierre Sciama, Simon Strachan, Susan Strachan, and Roger Wilmut, as well as my editor at Graywolf Press, Katie Dublinski.

GS

From my youth onward the memory of that chance encounter returns, at once insistent and elusive, like a riddle one never gives up hope of solving.

These are the facts. One day in spring I am walking home with a friend, a man in poor health. Suddenly he proposes that we go through the center of the city, lengthening our journey by a diversion that is especially puzzling, since he can have no love for this city in northern Russia, where every street reminds him of his tormented life. He stops close to a park fence, overcome by a fit of coughing, and turns aside, one hand clamped over his mouth, the other gripping an iron railing. At this very moment a woman steps out of a car a few yards away from where we have halted. She is holding the hand of a little boy, who glances at us with alarmed curiosity. In his eyes we look like a couple of drunkards about to throw up. The unease I feel does not banish a vaguer notion, more difficult to pinpoint in my mind. Obscurely I sense that our detour was not a matter of chance, nor was the appearance of this beautiful stranger … She walks past, leaving us with a swift tremor of perfume, bitter and chill, and at once the entrance opens to one of the apartment buildings that surround the park, and the caretaker admits the woman and child. My friend straightens up, we continue on our way. This chance encounter — its fleeting strangeness — leaves its mark on me at the time and returns throughout my life, long remaining an unsolved mystery.

There must be barely half a dozen people in the world today who remember Dmitri Ress. In my own memory just two very ill-matched fragments are preserved. Two pieces from a mosaic, which, if one did not know Ress, might be thought unconnected.

The first, this ruefully clumsy remark made by someone who knew him well: “He loved her … in a way one cannot be loved … other than far away from this earth.”

The second fragment — his activity as a dissident — was generally spoken of with the same puzzled hesitation. This was not a case of indifference toward a forgotten hero on the part of those who survived him. It was more a simple inability to grasp the logic underlying the struggle Ress waged until his death. For some, a quixotic battle, for others an act of suicide that continued over twenty years.

When first I met him, at the age of forty-four, bald, toothless, and ravaged by cancer, he looked like a sickly octogenarian. Taken together, his three successive criminal convictions amounted to a total of fifteen years and some few months spent behind barbed wire. The harshness of the sentences related to the originality of his beliefs: a philosopher by training, he criticized not the specific defects of the regime that held sway in the Russia of those days but the servility with which all men in all ages renounce intelligence to follow the herd.

“But why, in that case, do you direct your fury against our country?” he would be asked under interrogation. “Because it’s my native land,” he would reply. “And I find it particularly intolerable to see my compatriots dozing around a hog wallow.”

The upholders of the law perceived this as subversiveness of the worst kind. They preferred dealing with “classic” dissidents, who allowed themselves to be deported to the West, where the sharpest of pens were quickly blunted by well-sated indifference.

It was at the age of twenty-two that Dmitri Ress committed his first offense. On the eve of the traditional parade to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution, he put up a poster on the wall of an administrative building, executed with a real draftsman’s talent: the grandstand to which the Party dignitaries ascended, the sea of red flags, the banners covered in slogans glorifying communism, the two lines of soldiers forming a conduit for the forward progress of the patriotic demonstrators. Totally realistic. Except that the notables standing upright on the platform, the solid silhouettes topped off with soft felt hats, were shown as pigs. Little contemptuous eyes, snouts bloated with fat. And as the “popular masses” reached the foot of the grandstand they, too, were undergoing the start of this metamorphosis. The poster was captioned “Long Live the Great October Pork Harvest!”

This was a serious offense, but its perpetrator’s youth might have inspired clemency. All the more so because his zoological conceit was not new, all dissident literature made use of such devices, Solzhenitsyn himself compared one of the members of the nomenklatura to a brutal and lecherous boar. It would have been possible to plead a foolish error, the malign influence of things he had read … Unfortunately the young man proved to be arrogant, claiming he had painted what he saw, determined to denounce the whole animal pack. An indefensible attitude.

Nevertheless the judges showed some indulgence: three years in an ordinary penal colony.

Instead of making him compliant, the camp made him stubborn. As soon as he was released, he offended again. Drawings and pamphlets that now fell into a more grievous category: anti-soviet propaganda. In short, he made matters worse for himself. Which caused a judge, exasperated by so much inflexibility, to resort to a Russian expression that means, more or less, “Never crawl into the neck of a bottle.”

If only he had followed the logic of those dissidents who sounded off against the Kremlin and idolized the West. But no, he stuck to his guns: his graphic and literary output targeted the whole of humanity and his native land was merely one instance among others. He took a five-year sentence in his stride. Another, the last, in a camp “with a strict regime,” broke him physically but confirmed the flinty solidity of his convictions. What is more, he looked like a long shard of flint and on occasion his eyes flashed with glints of fire, flying sparks from an unconquered mind in a broken body.