Andreï Makine - Human Love

Outside, in the valleys blinding whiteness, the same black speck continued its winding course. “And that? Is that a bear too?” asked Elias.

“No. It’s the student I told you about. Well, he’s over fifty now. You remember, the one who wrote ‘SOSialism’… He’s out searching for his treasures. But it’d be better for him to tell you about them himself. We’ll go and see him this evening, if you like

Elias was expecting to find a madman undermined by the harshness of exile. The “student” spoke with an irony that presumed a diagnosis along these lines and thus refuted it. “To begin with,” he recounted, “it was just a schoolboy’s bright idea. Most meteorites either land in inaccessible places, oceans, seas, lakes, or mountains, for example. Or else on rocky terrain where these intergalactic visitors remain hidden amid the stones. So this poor student (who was obliged, alas, to interrupt his studies for a time) decided to search for heavenly objects where they’re most visible: on the immaculate whiteness of our beloved Siberia. I have a hundred correspondents more or less everywhere this side of the Urals… And now take a look at my collection!”

In long cases squared off into compartments they saw smooth fragments, some as small as cherry stones, some bulkier, reminiscent of dark Stone Age flints. On a large table covered with a waxed cloth there was an accumulation of chemistry apparatus, a star atlas, a telescope on a tripod. The commentary now delivered soon became at once too technical and too rhapsodic. To follow it all one would have had to fall in love with the tiniest streak on the surface of these aerolites… The “student” realized this, characterized himself as “obsessed with stars,” and, as if seeking their pardon for his astronomical pedantry, proclaimed: I’ve even written a poem.” He took down a sheet of paper that hung above his worktable, put on his glasses, and began to read. It was the tale of a meteorite hunter who constructed a planet for himself from his finds and quit the Earth. The tone was that of the verses one wrote at the age of twenty. He stopped growing up at the moment of his arrest, thought Elias.

They were already at the door, poised to leave, when the “student” led them back into the room. “You know, I want to say this without any political inference. From time to time the human race should judge itself from the point of view of these pebbles from heaven. That might make it less confident of its greatness.”

On the way back, as they passed through the “valley of the meteorites,” they each caught themselves distractedly glancing down at every dark stain. They laughed about it. “You know, he’s never talked like that to anyone before,” said Anna. “You must have impressed him. Yes. Like an extraterrestrial he can finally confide in…”

The next day at the edge of the taiga they came upon a couple who appeared to be seeking to bury themselves under the snow. An elderly man, dressed in a simple quilted jacket, a woman with slanted eyes, probably a Yakut. “Are you digging a den?” Anna called out to them. “Yes, a den for a flower,” replied the man. “This time they won’t go and trample on it.” He went back to thrusting long poles obliquely into the snow. Grasping the principle of this strange scaffolding, Elias helped them to complete it. They all went back together. The man told them that for years he had been watching out for the flowering of the “golden fire,” a kind of wild orchid, which opens at night and dies at dawn. He had located the spot where it grew, but each time he had missed the night when it bloomed. Once winter was over, the plant was often found trampled or uprooted by animals. So he had decided to construct a shelter before the snows melted…

They spent a while in the izba where the couple lived, ate some of the smoked fish prepared by the woman. The man was very eager to offer Elias a shapka . ‘Tve got five of them. I used to hunt a bit in the old days… Choose which one you like. Not that one. That s a museum piece. I wore it at the camp. Well. I got through several over twenty years. This is the last of them. And as for the flower, the golden fire, I mean, it was a thief who told me where to find it. A gold washer, in point of fact. He used to work with his panning trough in secret. He was caught, and for this he got ten years in the camp. Then one day in spring he tried to make a run for it. They tracked him down and the guards had dogs, as big as wild boar, that tore his throat out… He often used to talk to me about the flower, so straight off, I began to imagine I might find it one night when I was free. And now, you see, I tell myself, it was that plant that helped to stop me losing my mind. Because over twenty years there was plenty to make you do that. Especially when I got to thinking about the price I’d paid for three cartloads of muck. You know the story, Anna, but what you don’t know is that in ‘fifty-six, when I came out, they’d already chucked Stalin on the scrap heap. Then this fellow says to me: ‘Come on, Ivan. Take his picture and throw it on the dunghill. That way you’ll be quits.’ Well, I didn’t do it. Because now anyone could do it. Besides, I don’t like to kick a man when he’s down. And most of all, I couldn’t care less. I’d already started looking for the golden fire… Now then. One more glass so you don’t catch cold when you go out.”

They went home, cutting through the forest. Anna’s words sounded like an echo lost among the great cedar trunks. “When he met his wife, Zoya, she was… well, a kind of stray dog. Worse than a dog, a sick, half-mad wild animal, whom everyone despised. There are mines fifty miles away from Sarma. For a time the miners shared Zoya between them. When they went to work they locked her up in a shed and when they came back they raped her. In fact it wasn’t even rape by then, more like a regular routine… Then they got rid of her. Yes, a dog rooting among rubbish. One evening Ivan was passing close by the miners’ huts and, in the darkness, he thought he saw a fox. He was about to shoot it with his gun. Zoya was wearing an old coat scorched by fire… It took her several months to get back on her feet again. And one day Ivan told me he now knew why he went on living. And it was above all for her that he wanted to see that plant flowering in the night, the golden fire…”

Before making the journey Elias had thought he would be encountering human detritus, left over from the great workshop of the future society. Scraps, waste products, inevitable in a project on as grand a scale as that of communism. Yet here, among the materials rejected by the march of history, behold, a secret, tenacious life maintained its vigil. This humble existence seemed perfectly emancipated from the capricious rhetoric of the age. No verdict of history, thought Elias, had made its mark on these two beings who, when spring came, would be searching in the forest for their wild orchid.

One morning he saw Ivan leaving his izba and, a moment later, Zoya running after him. The man must have forgotten the leather bag she was holding out to him. She was dressed only in a skirt and pullover, despite the cold having gone down to fifty below, and this run through the snow, the encounter between the two figures in the middle of a white wilderness, their swift embrace, the tenuousness of the bond created between them for a moment, then broken, all this struck Ellas as total evidence of love. A stray dog, he recalled. Human scraps… Yet now in the silvery cold of the morning, there was this woman on the threshold of her house and this man, gliding along on his snow shoes, tracing an extended blue line across the endless white expanse.

ALMOST NOTHING WAS LEFT OF THE CAMP. The shells of huts. The gap-toothed lines of a double wooden perimeter fence. It shook in the wind, and from a distance it was possible to believe that an Alsatian dog was still trotting around between the twin palisades.