Andreï Makine - Human Love

To avoid tipping over into madness, I tried to invent some explanation, an African rite, an exorcism… one of those mythical superstitions the experts delight in, which might have made sense of this nocturnal dumb show. But only one thing seemed clear: the woman had just died, and I was witnessing a postmortem ceremony. A night sticky with humidity and decaying vegetation, the stinging web of insects, these men clasping her body, their fingers thrusting into her mouth, scraping at her throat…

The real terror of dying only struck at that moment, a knotty spasm like the awakening of an unknown being that had grown stealthily inside me and was now tearing at my entrails, my brain. The birth of my own cadaver, stuck fast to me, like a double.

After that nocturnal reprieve I was left with the memory of a paralyzing panic, next a sleepwalkers exhaustion, and then a new alarm provoked by the eruption of voices outside the door, a gunshot in the forest. I crawled along looking for a breach in the rough cast of the wall, woke the instructor, suggested that we should escape (he muttered, “This whole damned jungle here s the prison,” before going back to sleep). Thanks to the Zairean woman’s death, I was picturing the first moments that would follow my own: the soldiers would drag my lifeless body over and throw it down beside that of the African. The instructor might well be shot as he slept, but in any case he was one of that Soviet generation who died in the name of the mother country, of the freedom of fraternal peoples, of proletarian internationalism. On the brink of this last step into the void, I felt I was alone. I should have to escape alone.

This survival reflex having banished all shame, I approached the corpse. I wanted to search it, extract anything that might be of use to me: money and his papers, if he had contrived to hide them from the soldiers, any object of value with which to bribe a guard, the pen I could already feel in his pocket. A fine fountain pen, a relic of the civilized world. Its smooth, reassuring weight had the effect on me of an amulet…

“Theres no ink left in it.” The whisper caused the darkness around me to congeal into the density of smoked glass. A few moments later I found I was still holding out the pen, trying to hand it back, like a clumsy and shamefaced thief. “It’s this furnace… the inks all dried up… But if you could memorize an address…”

I was not surprised to hear him speaking in Russian. At that time, during the 1970s, thousands of Africans spoke it. But when I had recovered my wits, what struck me was the address spelled out by the black man. It was a place close to the Siberian village where I was born, a terrain that had always seemed to me to be the most obscure on earth. The man named it without hesitation, and it was only the fact that his lips were parched with thirst that added a burning, raw breathiness to the sound of the syllables. Definitive, like a last wish.

There was no longer any logic to the minutes that went racing by. Everything happened at once. His fevered but amazingly calm eyes shone by the glow of the lighter whose flame I shielded with my hand. I saw his wrists swollen beneath the twists of thick wire that I began to break through, strand by strand. I heard him gasp as the first trickle of water slipped down his throat. We had barely a pint of water left and. thirsty as he was, I thought he was going to swallow it all. He restrained himself (gritting his teeth) and spoke very softly banishing my fear in a few words. In the morning he said, the Cubans would attack and might well set us free. The chances were not great, but one could always hope. In that case the two of us, the instructor and I, could hope to be exchanged for UNITA prisoners… His tone was expressionless, detached, not seeking to influence me. Quite simply, as I would later understand, it offered me the chance to hold on without fear and trembling. Not to freeze at every cry. His words were there to teach me how to die when it was time to die. For a moment I believed I might be able to join him in this haughty indifference in the face of death. And then I managed to snap the last piece of wire on his left wrist, and with his hands free, he took off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt. Before the lighter burned my fingers, I had time to see the flesh carved raw, a suppurating crust covered in insects. Outside the door a howl from the Zairean woman rang out once more (later on the African would explain to me what the soldiers were looking for in this woman’s tormented body).

Why are they taking so long to kill her? The thought that formed in me came unbidden. They should have killed the lot of us. And, most of all, killed the parasites devouring this black man! In the darkness I could hear a piece of cloth being rubbed and smell the acrid tang of spirit: the African was cleansing his wound, the instructor had just passed him the flask. Huddled up against the wall, I felt as if I myself were entirely covered in wounds crawling with death.

And it was at that moment, heard over the sound of the instructors breathing (he had dozed off once again), that the African’s voice asserted itself, yet more remote than before, not concerned to persuade. He was no longer talking about the likelihood of our being rescued, nor about the Cuban forces advancing from the direction of Lucapa. What he was saying sounded like the murmuring that could be heard from very old men seated beside their izbas in my childhood. They would stare into the distance and speak of beings who no longer existed except in their white heads, heavy with years of war and the camps. Elias (I learned his name) was five or six years older than myself, but his voice had a resonance beyond his own life.

He spoke of a train traveling through an endless forest in winter. The journey lasted several days and little by little had blended into the life stories of the passengers, who eventually got to know one another like close kin. They shared food, recounted their past lives, stepped out into snow-covered railroad stations and returned carrying great black loaves under their arms. Sometimes the train would come to a halt in the heart of the taiga; Elias would open the door, leap out amid the snowdrifts, and hand down the woman who had brought him on this trip to the end of the world. They could hear the crunch of footsteps, the hiss of the locomotive in the distance… Then silence descended, a constellation glittered above the snow-laden fir trees, the exhalation of the sleeping forest filtered inside their clothes; the woman’s hand in his hand became the only source of life in the icy darkness of the universe…

He could have promised me a swift rescue by a Cuban commando squad the next morning; or a stoical, heroic end and survival in the memory of others. Or alternatively a painless death and the future bliss of eternal life. But none of this would have liberated me from fear as completely as did his slow, calm narrative.

The train moved off, he related, and there was a moment of childish anxiety, the fear of not having time to climb on board behind the woman he loved.

Despite the darkness, his tone of voice betrayed a smile, and incredulously, I sensed a smile on my own lips, too.

In my memory the address he had asked me to keep in mind would become the one sure refuge, a place to return to after losing everything, and where you know you will be accepted just as you are.

THE DOOR SLAMS SHUT BEHIND ME, and the full tragicomedy of the situation is revealed: wanting to avoid the hotel elevator and the jovial crowd of the ones I refer to as “the fat-cat Africans of the international conference circuit,” I climbed all nine floors of the back stairs on foot. And mistook the exit. Two rooms face onto the roof terrace, mine and the one whose interior I can now see through the large window. I cannot retrace my steps; the emergency exit is blocked, no doubt in the interests of people taking refuge on the rooftops from a fire – so that firemen can pick them up there. And in the room that I can see from the terrace, a man and a woman are already embarking on what shows every sign of leading to a sexual encounter. To get back to my own room, I should have to walk past their open French window and step over several plants in plastic holders… Impossible. I could have done it at the moment when the door slammed: stammered apologies, a rapid dive toward my own room… Now several seconds have elapsed; from being an idiot gone astray on the rooftops, I have turned into a Peeping Tom. The man s fingers are busy between the woman’s shoulder blades, fiddling with the fastenings of her bra. We know how to do so few original things with our own bodies. His hands appear very black on the woman’s milky skin.