Andreï Makine - Human Love

Humor often helped them. That glance, at once alarmed and confused, from a lady who found herself next to Elias one evening at the theater. The lights went down and he whispered in Anna’s ear: ‘Tm going to tell her IVe just been playing Othello and didn’t have time to remove my makeup…” The actors were dressed as soldiers in the civil war. and the stale dialogue matched the dust on their costumes. One of them declaimed ecstatically rolling his eyes upward: “The fire of our revolution will give birth to the new man!” At the interval Anna suggested they leave.

The first snowy breeze restored them to the life they loved. They let themselves wander through the labyrinth of little alleys that had survived the follies of reconstruction, walked down to the frozen ponds in a park, hearkened to the wind lashing the turrets of a mined monastery. The world reminded them of the play they had just fled: a pompous and loquacious farce forever shuffling its masks and its ham actors. Not to mention a certain lady in the eleventh row, contemplating the empty seat on her right with relief… They no longer needed that world.

What he felt was so simple he did not even try to put it Into words. It was enough for him to be walking with her beneath the snow, to feel the warmth of her hand, then the absence of this hand, the icy scent of the air, and on the frozen window of a late and almost empty bus, to see the dark circle left by Anna’s breath: she would peer through it from time to time, so as not to miss their stop, and that delicate trace of her breath would quickly become covered again with crystals of hoarfrost. When they got off. it seemed to him as if that rickety bus was carrying away with it a very important fragment of their lives.

He now had a breathless attachment to things that had previously seemed insignificant, invisible. One day, as he waited outside the university cloakrooms, he noticed a black garment in the row of coats and immediately recognized its shape and tired fabric. This gloomy place, bristling with coat hooks, was suddenly filled with an intense and vibrant life for him, much more real than everything happening elsewhere in that great building groaning with marble. He went up to it and saw that the last snowflakes were melting on the black coat’s worn collar. So Anna had only just arrived for her lectures, and the waiting period he must now endure seemed to him very different from the hours and minutes that passed for the others.

He had never lived through such moments in the company of a woman and indeed had never imagined himself capable of living and seeing with this grievous felicity, this hallucinatory sharpness. It was so new for him that one day he felt tempted to make fun of the extreme sensitivity he now felt within himself. “The new man!” he declared, mimicking the costumed revolutionary in the play he had seen with Anna. He smiled, but the description did not seem incorrect: an unknown being was coming to life within him. And when he thought about this new presence, an alloy of tenderness, confidence, peace, and the terrible dread of losing what he loved, a memory came back to him whole: the threshold of a hut at nightfall and the child burying his face in the crook of his mothers arm.

He now believed he had found the one to whom he could speak of that child, whose existence he had so far never admitted to anyone.

FOR THE MOMENT THE LECTURE HALL WAS EMPTY. Elias walked right up to the back row, where not even the recalcitrant students bothered to climb. He lay down across the seats and followed the slow awakening of the room as an invisible witness: the first voices, still resonant and distinct, the thumping of bags on the desktops, the rolling of a pen, an oath, then the crescendo of the uproar, laughter and, closer to his row, a tune being whistled, as if apart from the general cacophony. But above all that taut nerve within him, the timid hope of being able to make out Anna’s voice amid all this talk. Finally the rapid diminuendo of the noise, the lecturers abrupt, leonine cough, the practiced rhythm of his percussive delivery.

Lying there, Elias could see the silent, tumultuous precipitation of the white flurries outside the high bay windows. He told himself that from time to time, as she looked up from her notes, Anna might also be noticing this snowy tempest.

“… Creatively and with genius, Lenin thus develops the Marxist theory of socialism. Employing arguments that are historically and logically incontrovertible, he demonstrates that the construction of a socialist society is possible within one country, even if it is surrounded by hostile capitalist neighbors…” Elias listened to the less tedious fragments, including this one, which, without the censorship he usually imposed on himself, provoked the thought: “How true all this is. And how pointless…” Yes, incongruous in the universe where outside the window dusk was slowly falling on a snowy day.

He knew that after these lectures Anna would stay behind in the lecture hall for a few minutes to chat with a tall red-haired girl, her friend, who had transformed her first name into the somewhat improbable “Gina.” On this occasion it seemed to be a conversation embarked on long before, for Anna was merely responding distractedly to Gina s unpleasant and vehement remarks.

“No, you do what you like,” Gina was saying. “Look. When it comes to negroes, I know the score. Hes nice enough today, your Congolese… right, Angolan, I mean. But don’t forget. A black man’s a rutting orangutan. And once he’s screwed you it’s bye-bye babyl And you’ll be left with a little half-monkey on your hands. And taking pills for who knows how many tropical diseases…”

“Listen, Gina, we haven’t got to that stage at all, him and me. And he’s never

“Okay, he hasn’t got into your pants yet, this saint. He’s just biding his time, that’s all. So it’s up to you to choose your day Yes, your day He’s polygamous like they all are down there. And it’ll be your turn to get laid on, let’s say, Wednesdays. After all the rest of the tribe…”

On his way there Elias had been planning to appear in front of them, leaping out from the row where he had hidden, to take them by surprise. He was hoping to get himself accepted by the redheaded Gina. He was even preparing to do his number, emitting the cry of a rutting orangutan, when the true sense of this teasing suddenly became clear to him. All these taunts about the erotic excesses of black men were nothing more than folklore, to which he had long since become accustomed. The true question had the unvarnished and woeful banality of real life: after her studies Anna ran the risk of ending up in some remote corner of her native Siberia, so she must invent a means of remaining in the paradise of Moscow. Marry an African? Gina had considered this and arrived at her verdict: you’d be better off going and teaching Hegelian dialectics to the wolves in the taiga…

At a certain moment the argument began to go around in circles. Elias remained lying there, and with his head tilted slightly backward, he saw the swirling of long plumes of snow around a lamppost. A simple and intense happiness was conjured up by this hypnotic movement. Their wanderings through Moscow beneath surges of white… The little circle of melted hoarfrost made by Anna’s breath on the window of a bus… He closed his eyes, tried not to hear the two voices down at the bottom of the lecture hall, discussing the pros and cons of his blackness.

Anna said very little, in fact. Elias thought he could make out the rather slow intonation that he often noticed when she was speaking. “Look, Gina, of course he s black and all that. But he understands me like nobody else…” There was an exaggeratedly scornful laugh from Gina, the click of a lighter, and this observation: “You’re really stupid, my little Anna. Though… come to think of it maybe you’re made for each another. He’s just climbed down from his baobab tree and you’ve just emerged from your bear’s den.” As if she had not heard, Anna continued in the same dreamy tone: “And then, don’t laugh, but he’s a bit like a knight in shining armor! Yes. You know, I read that poem a thousand times in my teens. You remember. A lady drops her glove into an arena full of lions and tigers. The beasts roar, but this knight goes to retrieve the glove and returns it to the lady… Yes, I know, I know… A childishly romantic German poem… But you see, with him I feel I’m never telling lies. While with Vadim everything becomes false. Even the way I walk. With Vadim even the snow smells like ice from the fridge…”