Andreï Makine - Human Love

The Buryat woman came and fetched her child. They were left in the blue dusk that filled the compartment.

“… In the end this is the one mystery that stays with me from my childhood. Even though my mother was crushed by poverty and the contempt of those who bought her body she was able to give me absolute happiness, peace without any taint of anxiety. I’ve always believed that this capacity for love, which is in fact so simple, is a supreme gift. Yes, a divine power…”

During the last night of the journey he talked about that child on the threshold of a hut in Dondo burying his face in the crook of his mothers arm.

The following evening the declaration they had been waiting for finally arrived and was made wordlessly. Quite simply, they came close to death on the ice of a river that served as a road in winter. A truck driver had left them at this intersection of forest roads. He had sworn his comrade would be along at any minute. It was still daylight. An hour later darkness enveloped the little shelter with three walls where they had taken refuge. They spent that hour jumping up and down, pummeling one another, rubbing one another’s cheeks and noses. The air was clear, no breath of wind. The cold molded itself to their bodies as if they were encased in molten glass. And once they moved, this carapace exploded and they felt as if they were swallowing crushed splinters.

They made a fire, but in order to fetch wood they had to climb a steep bank, plunge waist deep into the snow, battle with branches, using hands that no longer obeyed them. This expedition took a good twenty minutes; the fire had time to die down, and their muscles to go numb, anaesthetized by the cold. At one moment, halfway between the shelter and the forest, Elias wanted to lie down, to sink back into the drowsiness that made him light-headed, unfeeling. He shook himself, snatched up a fistful of snow, rubbed his face furiously, then clambered up and, with gritted teeth, began breaking branches. And all at once stood upright, listened… As he came hurtling down the slope he lost half of the firewood. “I heard… I heard… he said in a whisper, as if his voice might alarm the faintly detected sound. They listened, turning their heads right and left. All that was perceptible was tiny crackling noises from the fire that had almost gone out. The mist from their breath rose upward, drawn aloft by the black gulf of the sky. The stars seemed to be closing in on them, surrounding them… Elias felt the pressure of a hand on his wrist and could no longer make out whether he was giving or receiving the warmth that remained to them. Anna pressed herself against him, and there amid the starry space they formed a frail islet of life.

The driver who picked them up would seemingly have remained just as impassive had he come upon their frozen corpses inside the shelter. Elias studied the hands resting on the wheel: fresh scratches, the blood scarcely dried, and showing through beneath it, a faint tattoo: 46-55 and the name of one of the camps at Kolyma.

The man spoke, offering no excuses but simply to establish what Ellas already knew: “Worse things happen.” Worse was the frosts that followed a brief thaw. The ice on the rivers he drove along became covered in water, and this froze in its turn. One river on top of another, as it were. The wheels sank into it and in a matter of moments were caught, welded in. That was what had happened to him a little earlier. Sometimes trucks were discovered under six feet of snow… Between the two numerals on his tattoo the computation was simple: 1946-1955, nine years of forced labor somewhere beneath this icy sky After that, thought Elias, nothing else can really touch him…

“You should have come to Sarma in the spring,” lamented the driver suddenly. “There’s a copse over there, half a dozen miles or so, full of birds. How they sing, the little bastards! Nightingales. You wouldn’t believe it. Over there. Near where the camp was…”A minute later he began making little clacking noises with his tongue, followed by a whistling and clicking sound. Elias thought he was imitating the trilling of a nightingale. The driver growled: “What a stupid bitch, that dentist! I told her to take it out. She s filled it, that bloody back tooth. And now I don’t need a thermometer any more. As soon as it gets to forty below it has me howling like a wolf.”

As he dropped them at Sarma just after midnight, he whispered to Elias with a wink: “You look a lot like Pelé. I saw him playing a couple of years ago, on television… Off you go. Stoke the stove well!” For a moment they watched the swaying of the long trailer laden with tree trunks. The sensation of parting from a man in the midst of this white infinity had a grievous intensity about it. Nine years in the camp, nightingales, a badly filled molar, Pelé… Elias felt he had made contact, in a brief space of time, with the subterranean and tangled truth of a human being.

This intimacy with the truth, at once poignant and radiant, struck him more than everything else at Sarma. From the very first look Annas mother gave him. She opened the door to them, put her arms around them, without wasted words, incuriously A calm, absolute certainty was transmitted to Elias: he could walk in at this door in ten years’ time, and she would be waiting for him.

“The bath’s still hot,” the mother said. “In this cold, I knew you’d be late.”

To him everything in the tiny bathhouse was amazing: the bitter scent of the smoke-caked walls, the birch twigs with which he was expected to lash himself, the steam burning his nostrils. But this exoticism was nothing beside the blue darkness perceived through the narrow window above a bench. Outside the cloudy glass the cold forbade any trace of life, while here, on the planks drenched in boiling water, was his naked body, more alive than ever.

At Sarma he saw death, survival, and life combining in a secret, constant transfusion.

He awoke dazzled by the abundance of sunlight. And the first thing he saw on this white planet was a dot moving slowly along in the middle of a valley surrounded by the taiga. A man? An animal? Elias watched the sinuous path followed by this little black speck, then made a tour of the room, looked for a long time at the photo of a young soldier. “Smolensk, April 1941,” it read at the bottom of the picture. The wooden front steps groaned loudly under someone’s footsteps. Elias hurried into the entrance hall and saw Annas mother. “She’s gone to see Georgi, the hunter, to fetch a good fur jacket for you. You won’t get far with that coat of yours. It’s forty-eight below this morning… Come and drink some tea.” The surface of the water in the two pails she set down was pearly with ice.

At table the silence that fell was not oppressive. The crackling of the fire, the drowsy ticking of a clock, and most of all, the great tranquillity, all this made words less necessary. And yet Elias felt he needed to give an account of himself, to explain his presence (my African face, he thought, vexed with himself for not finding any way to start a conversation). Then he remembered the driver who had given them a lift the night before, his tale of the nightingales… The woman listened to him then, after a moments hesitation murmured: “Yes. There used to be a lot of birds at the time when the camp was there. Yes. Nightingales more than anything… Then one day, at the end of the forties, I think, the authorities gave orders to cut down all the trees. They d noticed that in springtime, as soon as the birds began to sing, the number of escapes went up. Under Khrushchev they closed the camp. The trees have grown again. The birds have come back…”

Anna returned, bringing a long fur jacket, “There. Put that on and you can go into hibernation. It’s bear.”