Andreï Makine - Human Love

He went home on foot, muttering reproaches, cursing the country, the slow pace at which the new man was coming into being here, and the stupid knight errant role he had just been playing. He inveighed against Anna, her resignation, and Moscow, this crushing and cold city the Russians and their past as slaves. And yet it was this past that made them close to him. In the end he found bitter consolation in telling himself that in Angola he would know how to avoid all the errors he had observed in the USSR. And that the Angolan revolution would be tarnished with none of these hereditary blemishes.

Their paths crossed on two occasions during the time before his departure (he concealed the episode of the brawl from Anna, inventing a mission to a military camp in the provinces). The first time he did not notice her. She it was who told him about the scene later: he was coming out of a restaurant with an extremely elegant man (it was Alves) and a pretty laughing woman (the latter s wife); they were getting into a foreign make of car, and Gina, who was with Anna that day, gave a whistle: “There you go, my poor friend, still running after your black prince. But you can see for yourself. He’d rather be screwing that chick with the stiletto heels…”

The second time, as if in a mirror image, it was Elias who, after two hours of waiting in the university foyer, came upon Anna, accompanied by Vadim and an elderly man (the young man’s father, he was later to learn). Anna was weeping; Vadim was waving his arms about as if to drive away a wasp. The father, with a concerned but determined air, was talking in reassuring and controlled tones. For a brief, fantastic moment the trio reminded Elias of those trios of times past, arranged marriages where suddenly the fiancée bursts into tears. But no. It was actually a family matter in which he had no part to play

They were left with this double misunderstanding for more than a month; then in a few minutes’ telephone conversation he spoke to her about Joâo Alves, and Anna told him about the anonymous letter that had reached the rector of the university: in it she had been described as the daughter of a common criminal. By using all his connections, Vadim’s father had managed to suppress the affair…

He was due to leave from a military airport to which she could not have access. They spent the evening of the previous day walking slowly along the sleepy alleyways between the Moskova and the Yauza rivers, amid the early April mist. Their lives had already diverged greatly and would continue to draw further apart, soon having no point of intersection at all. The torment of wars and African revolutions he was to plunge into. The life of the Moscow elite she would have to face up to. And yet that evening these destined life courses seemed to have no connection with their real lives. What was essential had already been found; they carried it within themselves, sharing it. At the moment of parting they did not embrace, but simply looked at one another for a long while. “You know,” he said, “we’ll go back to Sarma one day, and we’ll find that orchid under the snow…”

In actual fact he did not speak of that return, for fear of making her cry. Simply, throughout the remaining years of his life, at the most painful times during all those years, he would repeat these words, like a silent prayer, which was known to no one but Anna.

IN APRIL 1977 IN A STREET IN LUANDA he overheard a couple talking. The man was explaining to his wife that she was wrong not to clean the frying pan right away after supper because the grease, when congealed, gave off an intolerably pungent smell of burned fat. As man and wife walked along, they continued their mild altercation, each halfheartedly rejecting the others arguments. Given the price of oil, the woman maintained, it was better to keep a layer of it at the bottom of the frying pan…

A ridiculous echo struck a chord within him: Cuba, a young French pasionaria irritated by the increasingly bourgeois attitudes of the “popular masses,” forever frying their fish amid acrid oil smoke… Now in Angola it was Year III of the revolution. He glanced at the couple as they made their way along the Avenida dos Combatentes. The husband, probably a member of the MPLA, the wife, given how she spoke and dressed, a government official. Both of them quite young. Sad.

The Portuguese had cut and run; the country belonged to the Angolans; areas out of bounds to blacks no longer existed. The intoxication of the brand-new revolution was there to turn every word, every step taken into an adventure, a blaze of fire! If the revolution doesn’t change the way we love … Elias smiled, recalling the exalted dreams of his adolescence. In the distance the couple were still arguing: the man gesticulating with his right hand, no doubt demonstrating the correct way to scour a frying pan.

The intoxication was something he had experienced powerfully as soon as he returned. All the more because the revolutions success had proved to be almost unbelievably dazzling. The colonizers had packed their bags and left, and the MPLA, the Marxist-Leninist party (the only party, according to malicious tongues), had set about building the society of the future. In order to comprehend this rapid progress he had reread a book on the 1917 revolution and verified that the seizure of power had been just as miraculously simple in Russia. Was this a trap set by history for revolutionaries drunk with victory?

He was reminded of this trap when he encountered the spouses discussing their frying pan. Year III of the revolution… He was on his way back from Zaire after an intelligence mission in the absurd war (“a weary war,” he told himself) that put the two countries in conflict. The Angolan government wanted to know how much weight former refugees from Katanga carried in this struggle. The Soviets, for their part, were interested in the possibility of undermining Mobutu’s regime. Out in the field this curiosity on the part of both had led Elias to an Angolan soldier who was slaking his thirst, his face immersed in the water of a river. Drawing closer, he had seen that the man was dead, and little fishes were playing around his head as the current washed over it. In the forest beside the riverbank, the corpses there, too, had had time to settle into the poses of the living. That is how a battlefield appears when one comes upon it after the fighting is over…

He had been hit himself by a shell splinter: that streak above his left eyebrow. “I could really have done without this trademark,” he told himself angrily. This nick was a characteristic feature of his image as a “generic African.” As he looked in the mirror, it suddenly occurred to him that this eyebrow, drawn into a slight frown by the scar, might be seen one day by Anna… For a long time now he had made it a rule to remember only one aspect of that Russian past: the train that halts in the middle of the snowy taiga, a young woman climbing back on board carrying the fragrance of the night in the fabric of her dress… In his profession the drug of memories was a grave danger, on account of their sweetness.

The argument about a badly cleaned frying pan was a trigger, both ludicrous and timely He noted others, just as superficial and serious. For a time he managed not to grant them the terminal significance of: When revolutions die…

The death knell sounds, he thought, one evening at an official dinner, when this type of woman appears. Seated opposite him, the wife of one of the party leaders was puffing out her cheeks to suppress a belch, sighing, using a fork to toy with the food left on her plate. Year III of the revolution, and somewhere, beside a river, that young dead soldier and, on the opposite bank, a village where the children would have been at one another’s throats for the meal that this fork was tinkering with…