Andreï Makine: Human Love

Behind the anecdote about the policemen encumbered by a “relay-suitcase” there had been very discreet negotiations that evening in Brazzaville between the emissaries of the South African regime (the demons of apartheid!) and the representatives of the socialist regime of Angola – the caution of two reptiles feeling one another in the dark, sniffing one another, hesitating between confrontation and doing a deal. And all mixed up with this nest of vipers, several CIA agents, as well as those of UNITA, and the indiscreet oilmen from Elf, and the diamond buyers (that Lebanese of Armenian origin, among others, the lid of his left eye grotesquely distended by a magnifying glass), and the arms salesmen, one of whom remarked to me one day with cheerful amazement: Tve sold such a lot, there really shouldn’t be many people left on earth

Some years later the diamond merchant would be discovered at his desk with his bloodied head resting on a pile of gemstones. The wife of the president who offered his hospitality for the secret meeting at Brazzaville would be accused of this murder. The arms salesmen would change the names of their agencies and the oilmen those of their companies. UNITA would be decapitated. But this would make no difference to the background noise at those African summits: the discreet chink of diamonds being appraised, the pumping of black blood beneath the waves, the crunch of armored vehicles on the rutted tarmac of cities in flames, the screams of raped women, children having their throats cut, the crackle of the flames on the burning roofs of huts, and somewhere at some great film festival the ecstatic whispers surrounding a star who is wearing around her neck stones of the first water, so rare, so pure…

At the emperors. Twelve pianists .

Yet another detail strangely preserved from oblivion: it could be called a dumb show, for the performance was entirely silent and the recounting of it left us speechless, giving rise to an almost metaphysical amazement. One of Bokassas residences, a room where the lights are low; a dozen piano stools in a row occupied by naked women who have their backs turned. A hand clap, and in a perfectly synchronized movement all twelve of them swivel round to face the master, who has a strangely weary, almost aggrieved air, as if this carnal treasure disappoints him profoundly… The vision of these “beautiful pianists with no piano,” as Elias called them, was on a level with other acts of depravity dreamed up by the tyrants of that continent, the pharaonic cathedrals and castles erected upon the graves of famine victims. But the twelve piano stools went further, for this spinning harem touched the most sensitive spot in a man’s heart: the impossibility of loving, even while possessing so much flesh, purchased in Africa, in Europe, and elsewhere… The master of the pianists – the “Emperor 1 – would be overthrown a year later in a country strewn with mutilated bodies. And amid all the jumble of wealth and obscenities that such a reign leaves in its wake, we are left with the picture of those twelve piano stools, absurdly lined up in a hall hung with valuable pelts.

Moscow. The death of a poet .

That vignette would soon find its echo during the trip to Moscow on which Elias accompanied President Agostinho Neto. The poison that killed the president had the characteristic of causing a spasm in the cardiac muscle, which made the death appear to be a perfectly convincing heart attack. It took just a psychological trigger, an additional rush of blood, to unleash the effect of the substance… The president was entering the suite placed at his disposal when in a small circular room he was passing through, this woman (she was busy cleaning the keyboard of a grand piano: a discordant lament of merry notes) greeted him and informed him that she would be taking care of his nocturnal requirements. The sentence was uttered in correct but somewhat rudimentary Portuguese, allowing for some ambiguity: nocturnal requirements?… A young blond woman, an apron fitting tightly over broad hips, emphasizing a slender waist… She stared at him as if awaiting a reply. He hesitated, sat down in an armchair, smiled at her. She settled down on the piano stool, as if she were resting for a moment before resuming her dusting. Beside the armchair, on a low table, stood several bottles of drink. Did he succumb straight away? After a glass? After an embrace? Or did they have time to undress and he to take his pleasure? The next day the Soviet authorities announced that the Angolan president, suffering from a serious illness, had come to the USSR to be treated, but despite all the efforts of the best doctors, he had not survived.

Elias will retain from all this the piano stool he had seen the previous day when he brought a dispatch to the presidents secretary. A quite ordinary black stool, like the ones the Central African tyrant’s “pianists” had spun round on. Details, yes, but it was perhaps the first time that he perceived with such intensity the supreme absurdity that ruled the lives and deaths of human beings. Before they left, the Soviets showed the members of the Angolan delegation a short documentary film. It was an account of the conflict between perfidious Somalia and faithful Ethiopia. Panoramic shots displayed the titanic disembarking of hundreds of armored vehicles, entire squadrons, countless artillery pieces. A complete prepackaged war, handed on a plate by the empire to its Ethiopian protégé. And then the results: arid stretches of the Ogaden in Ethiopia, covered in Somalian corpses and the debris of their weapons. At its close, the camera, no doubt mounted on a helicopter, swooped down over endless columns of distraught prisoners. The film had no sound track, and this silence gave the images an even more crushing force, a bleak and categorical argument. It was a lesson, yes. The Angolan leaders were supposed to appreciate the weight of the vengeance that fell upon the enemies of the empire.

Moscow. An hour with Anna .

Elias had an extremely brief meeting with Anna, on the very last evening of that visit to Moscow. Agostinho Neto s body, the entrails cleaned of all trace of poison, had already been prepared to be sent back to Luanda. In subdued tones the members of the delegation, some devastated, some relieved, were discussing the film they had just seen. Elias managed to escape, rang up from a public phone box, learned that Anna was celebrating her husband Vadims birthday with friends. She went down into the park where Elias was waiting for her, and they began walking under the mild September rain by a light reminiscent of the soft blue haze of a spring they had never lived through together. At first sight Annas face seemed to him coarsened by a fixed smile intended for her guests, by smooth, impersonal makeup. Little by little the showers banished this fixity from her features, and he saw, perhaps only with the vision that lay hidden in his heart, the young woman who once used to lead him through the snow-covered streets of Moscow. The one who believed in a knight brave enough to go down into the arena and bring back a glove for his fair lady. The one who boarded the train with the scent of a forest In winter clinging to the gray wool of her dress… They hardly spoke, and before parting (she had to hurry back to rejoin the guests, doubtless already uneasy about her absence), they embraced with such violence that he slightly grazed his lip in this clumsy and feverish kiss.

The logic of history .

I know they saw one another again in Africa on several occasions, even during the years when the USSR’s Imperial adventure on the black continent was drawing to a close. Lucapa, Kinshasa, Maputo, Mogadishu… Elias spoke little of them to me, and it was especially those few days spent in Moscow at the time of Neto’s death that he sought to describe to me, as if they offered a digest of all the contradictions of his life as a fighter. He told me things he did not have time to recount to Anna, and in any case would never have told her. Details that suddenly offered proof of the madness of history Yes, piano stools and a dozen whores trained to spin round on them at a hand clap. And that stool where a young woman sits before supervising a man s death agony with professional calm. And beyond the farcical insanity of these coincidences, millions of men pitched against one another in the name of a hatred that will appear stupid the next day, after these men have been bled to death. So then another hatred will have to be invented and dressed up in humanistic or messianic rags, placated with the sound of tank tracks on the tarmac of ruined cities, with the roar of big guns firing on unarmed men. And all of this so that in a great hall where the walls are hung with pelts, a man, weary of massacres, wealth, and female flesh, should rest his heavy and nauseated gaze on the backsides of women as they spin round on their piano stools. And so that another man, an occasional poet, should suddenly let his glass of brandy slip onto the carpet and tumble out of his armchair, his eyes rolling upward, at the feet of a woman whose breasts he has just been fondling. The circle is complete. History has done its work.