Andreï Makine - Human Love

Beneath our feet, in the marine depths, the steel tubes continue to pump the black blood that will turn into money, arms, the red blood of the dead, bought female flesh. I want to say this to Elias, to shake his faith, to mock his obstinacy. Two months previously I had seen Anna at a reception at the Soviet embassy in Maputo, where her husband had been posted. She reminded me of a big smiling doll, uttering bland inanities, batting her eyelashes with the regularity of an automaton. I was positioned somewhat to one side, and I could see that the fingers of her left hand were kneading the handle of her handbag, her thumbnail was tearing the leather, and this tensed hand was the only true and living part of this clockwork doll.

“Two months ago, at Maputo,” I say, “I ran into… Anna.”

Maputo. Beyond words .

I take a breath before deciding to tell him what I think of this woman, what a Russian can think of this Russian woman, and what might perhaps be missed by an African or, quite simply, the man who loved her and still loves her. I don’t have time to go on. Elias starts to talk very softly, his gaze lost in the supple motion of the waves slipping along the jetty. An evening, the same gathering of guests in an embassy garden, the same expressions, either rigid or, on the contrary, animated by the grimaces of social chitchat, the same routine conversations where no one listens to anyone. He is separated from Anna by a few feet of this air laden with hypocrisy. They cannot speak to one another; they must not betray their past in any way, not a gesture, not a smile. For them to stand so close to one another without recognizing one another is the best way of pretending to be strangers. She looks like a big, beautiful doll, he thinks, and doubtless everyone else thinks the same. He has aged, she must be telling herself; his hair is turning gray, there’s that scar on his temple, and his wrist in the plaster cast concealed by the sleeve of his shirt. She lets this doll do the talking for her, he thinks, and is becoming just as I knew her in Moscow, that quivering of the eyelashes is exactly as it used to be… For several minutes, as the guests come and go across the garden, they are left alone. Without turning his head toward Anna, Elias recites the names of streets in Moscow at random. She repeats them, in a hesitant echo, then grows bolder and murmurs: “So you haven’t forgotten them…” Other names, precious passwords, are whispered: those of little stations far away in the middle of the taiga. The beautiful doll smiles at a couple who greet her in passing. Anna whispers again, her lips hardly open: “I’ve had a letter from Sarma. They’re asking when you’ll come back… So glad to meet you… Oh, very lovely! Especially the Maputo game reserve and Inhaca Island …” The doll speaks to a couple, an extremely suntanned man, a pale, sickly looking woman. Elias moves away, carrying with him just the melody of that “when you’ll come back…”

That night in Cabinda I believe I have understood what he truly experienced at Sarma: a life that comes into being when history, having exhausted its atrocities and promises, leaves us naked beneath the sky, confronting only the gaze of the one we love.

Some weeks after that encounter with Anna at the reception he almost died in an ambush to the north of Mox-ico. He hardly mentioned it to me, not wanting to strike a warrior’s pose. All I remember is the comment he made softly, as if to himself: “When death stares us coolly in the eye we perceive that in our lives there have been a few hours of sunlight or of darkness, a few faces to which we return continually and that what has kept us alive, in fact, is the simple hope of finding them again…”

Moxico . Games for grown-ups .

For us, the years that will follow are to be a time of defeat, flight, scattering. Elias will live through them without any change of attitude, as if the goal he has always pursued had not lost all meaning. One day I will learn that he has conducted negotiations single-handedly with the men of UNITA in southern Moxico and succeeded in avoiding the resumption of fighting. Just on that occasion, just in that area, saving the lives of the inhabitants of just one village. I will remember what he said about the modesty of the tasks he henceforth set himself. In the conflagration Africa was entering into at that time, this modest success will seem to me more important than all the planning for the planet. Throughout the discussions in a hut in the village a child was playing at the other end of the room; sitting on the ground, she was building a pyramid of empty cartridge cases from a machine gun, on top of a wobbly table. When the argument was at its height, and Elias no longer had any hope of reaching agreement, and therefore of remaining alive once the bargaining broke down, the whole edifice of cartridge cases collapsed with a metallic clatter. The grownups looked round. The child froze, contrite. Elias remembered that village in Kivu half burned in the war and a little girl curled up between the legs of a low table, the child trembling so much that the piece of furniture seemed alive… He began talking again with the arrogant strength of one no longer concerned about his own survival. This indifference in the face of death, as he already knew, gives one a great advantage over those who have yet to come to terms with their fear of dying.

Brazzaville. The purity of gemstones .

He was on his way out of his hotel when two policemen in civilian clothes accosted him. Everything now happened with split-second timing. He looked them up and down scornfully, handed one of them his suitcase, and without raising his voice, ordered: “Here. Put this in my car out there. A gray Mercedes…” The trick worked perfectly. The tone of calm, peremptory authority. The policemen, who were supposed to be arresting him, obeyed, walked over to the exit, subjugated, hypnotized, and it was only once they were outside, where no “gray Mercedes” was to be seen, that they roused themselves and retraced their steps quickly. Elias had time to slip out through the side entrance, in front of which a car was waiting for him…

From those final years I retain a handful of such anecdotes that he used to recount to me with a smile when we ran into one another between flights, in the course of some mission or other. The memory of them is buried in a jumble of details that seem utterly pointless today but which were a matter of life and death at the time. The business with the suitcase… It is a routine technique, in fact, known as the “relay-object,” which he had doubtless learned during the course of his training as an intelligence agent. The procedure is simple: if anyone obstructs you, you must on any pretext whatever hand them an object that encumbers them and for which they become responsible. To a fierce gatekeeper barring your way at the entrance to a protected place you hand a briefcase, remarking: “General X’s sergeant will come to collect this at six-thirty hours. Take good care of it.” And while the guard is pondering, overwhelmed by the weight of the onus put on him, you pass through.

What remains in my memory is Elias s smile as he told me about these tricks of the trade, sometimes adding: “So in the end our practical training in Moscow wasn’t wasted. All those assaults on the presidential palace’… And by and large, I can confirm, it does happen more or less the way our instructors taught us it would. And the hardest thing of all is to avoid killing the children when there are bursts of gunfire on all sides… In our training they were celluloid dolls.”

Behind his light touch with the detail lay concealed long wars, sometimes raging, sometimes running out of steam, villages populated with corpses, and one morning, a fine spring morning, that youth dragging his mother’s body, riddled with bullet wounds, along a road in the south of Moxico. Elias took them to the nearest town. The intolerable weight of that body.