Andreï Makine: The Life of an Unknown Man

The story is very simple, she was saying, a woman loves a very young man who is hooked on drugs. After a year and a half of struggle she manages to save him. A month later he meets a girl of his own age and leaves.

“In fact, the book starts when it’s all over for my heroine. I think that’s how it is in our lives. When you expect nothing more, life opens up to what is really important…”

Suddenly, still in her calm voice, she addressed Shutov: “Just now you were quoting Chekhov… Yes, he encouraged us to cut the opening and the ending of a story. But I don’t know if Doctor Chekhov’s remedy can cure a novel. In any event, my heroine comes to life in the part of the story he advised us to cut.”

And without any change of tone, without declaiming, she read several sentences from the book open in front of her. A forest in winter, a woman on a footpath with a brown carpet of fallen leaves, a soothing, acrid scent, grief turning to joy at each step taken down a misty avenue of trees…

The broadcast ended. Shutov remained seated, his eyes half closed. A forest in the mist, a figure disappearing at the end of a pathway… A technician roused him to retrieve his microphone. In the corridor, near the makeup room, he caught up with the gray-haired woman. “Why did you take part in that farce?” He did not have the courage to ask her this, murmuring instead: “I was grateful for Chekhov! Thanks to you I didn’t look so stupid. But I didn’t catch the name of your book…”

“ After Her Life. I’ll send it to you. I read yours when it came out. I’ve read all your books. But I didn’t expect to see you here. Why did you come?”

They smiled, imagining the excuses writers generally concoct: my publisher was very insistent, I was there to hold the line against dumbing down… And at that moment he saw Léa.

“That was fantastic!” she declared, kissing him on the cheek. He turned to introduce her to the gray-haired woman but the latter had already gone into the makeup room. “No, it was great,” Léa went on. “It made you want to read the books. Especially that Chinese writer. I really liked him. What he said about the yin and the yang was really deep. But I thought the woman next to you, the one who came on last, was, like, hopeless. Did you see how she was made up? She looked…”

The “hopeless” woman emerged from the makeup room and Shutov saw her moving away. As she walked along she was rubbing her face with a tissue and from a distance one might have thought she was wiping away tears.

In the taxi Léa’s enthusiasm knew no bounds. Shutov reflected that the stupid media magic had given him a makeover and perhaps what had felt like a wretched failure would give their partnership a new lease on life. Léa praised the young witch’s performance. She thought it clever how she had “only just got away with it.” Then she went back to the woman reading a few lines from her book. “I simply can’t make that one out. It was a real mistake putting her on. She’s, like, old and dreary, you know, not sexy at all. And she looked as if she was bored out of her skull. It was lucky for her you mentioned Chekhov. It gave her the chance to show off a bit…”

Shutov touched Léa’s hand and murmured very calmly: “You don’t need to go on, Léa. I know you’re not as moronic as you make out.”

Then he quickly regretted this undiplomatic remark, knowing that people never forgive you for refusing to join in games of self-deception.

Nor was Shutov deceived by Léa’s “infidelities.” The word had a farcical ring to it-he found others (“she sleeps with a friend from time to time”), preferring to act like a writer: to live at arm’s length from the situation so as not to suffer from it and one day to be able to describe it. But the posture of the detached observer is a delusion. He suffered, despised his own suffering, lapsed into mocking cynicism, reemerged to clear his beloved of all suspicion, behaved, in fact, precisely like the hero of one of those psychological novels whose authors meticulously flaunt their knowledge of the human psyche, just the type of book he detested.

What he succeeded best at was turning a blind eye. He had already noticed that, with increasing age, this exercise became easier.

That evening, too, he would have forced himself to see nothing, had Léa not decided to present him with an illusion of love regained.

It was a bleak dusk in early February; reflected in the tarmac was a whole subterranean world into which you could have hurled yourself and disappeared. Shutov was on his way back from a meeting (a publisher had been explaining to him just why the subject of his novel was unsaleable). Unable to brave the crowd in the metro, he had climbed all the way up to Ménilmontant on foot. Just a little more pain might make his life unbearable and what then?… Cut his own throat? String himself up? Such things are fine in a novel, but in real life the final straw took the form of an overturned trash can below their apartment building, a cornucopia spilling out its household garbage. Not something to slit your carotid artery over, my good scribblers!

As he mounted the narrow spiral staircase he could already smell the aroma of a wood fire. Behind the door of the dovecote there was a ripple of silky music but in the time it took to locate the keyhole Shutov experienced conflicting sensations: within his attic a party was in full swing yet he, a man clad in a rain-soaked overcoat, no longer possessed the right key to enter into this convivial life.

Léa had prepared a dinner, lit the fire and candles, the illusion was complete. Right down to the simulation of their readings in the old days. At the end of the meal she declared in somewhat exaggerated tones: “I’ve just been reading Chekhov’s ‘Vanka.’ You know, it’s heartbreaking. I wept… No, I really cried my eyes out!”

Shutov studied her. An attractive young woman smoking nonchalantly, curled up in a feline pose (“a hackneyed image,” he quibbled). And two years earlier that girl rather strapped for cash in a telephone booth at the Gare de l’Est. A striking but natural change: the swift adaptability of youth, the vigor of a life taking wing. Journalism classes, which, in France, lead to everything, a group of friends her own age. And this still useful, aging man, whom it would be easy to get rid of. A man she feels like cheering up, one winter’s evening, by lighting up his garret with a scattering of sparks from her youthful, free, intense existence…

“You know, Léa, I’ve never been crazy about Chekhov.”

In Shutov’s voice there was the hint of an overtaut string stretched too far, despite the banality of his observation. Drowsy as she was, she must have noticed it.

“I see. I thought you… Look, remember you used to swear by him! His sentences like lancet stabs. You were the one who used to say that…”

His elbows on the table, he massaged his brow, then looked at Léa and realized that what she saw was this face creased by a whole evening of pulling forced expressions.

“No, I’m not talking about his style,” he replied. “He’s a storyteller without equal. Concision, the art of detail, humor. It’s all there. I bow to him! What goes against the grain is all that compassion of Chekhov’s. Granted, he’s a humanist. He takes pity on an aristocrat who’s blown all her money in Paris and returns to Russia to bemoan her lot in her beloved cherry orchard. He feels sorry for three provincial women who can’t manage to leave their own backyard and go to Moscow. He laments the fate of a whole crowd of doctors, petty gentry, eternal students and…”

“But hold on, those were people who suffered! He shows how society broke their dreams, how the mediocrity of their period suffocated them…”