Andreï Makine - Human Love

In cases like this, he knows, some people start drinking or take refuge behind extra boorishness and cynicism, or else forget, or kill themselves. From now on he becomes a prey to these frequent attacks of weeping, a ridiculous reaction that prevents him doing his work. The solution he has found is this old tape recorder, which murmurs softly in a corner of the operating theater and which, in the end, everyone gets used to…

I learn that he is called Leonid, that he comes from Leningrad, that his grandfather had been a doctor and died during the siege, So it was destiny or an utterly stupid mischance, that took that young man to an Afghan village where he had an impulse to smoke…

He, too, is going to Mogadishu. “Mind you, given the situation there,” he concludes, “I think well be taking off again pretty quickly,” and he puts his headphones back on again.

Destiny… Behind each of the shadowy figures crammed into that plane there is doubtless a story something like that day of sunshine in the Baghlan mountains, the trucks, the soldiers grinning at the children, then the shouting, the blood…

I once more picture a pretty woman of forty, a kind of Soviet bourgeoise, seated in the middle of a drawing room overloaded with rare and precious objects, a woman waiting for an African, yes, a black man foolish enough to have loved her for twenty years, a man grown old, who has just had several stitches removed from his arm and above his left cheekbone.

And then one evening, in a street in the Somalian capital ravaged by gunfire, I have an opportunity to talk with Elias at length. The very last opportunity. I am not aware of this at the time and am more concerned about the progress of the fighters, who are loosing off machine guns in all directions as they advance toward the fortress-villa of the presidential palace. The house where we are hiding has been ransacked and half burned and is therefore no longer interesting, which makes it safe. Even the electric cables have been ripped out, as well as the baseboards, the hinges from the doors – and beneath the window there, I can see it now, some of the bricks are already loose. The whole of Mogadishu seems to have been eviscerated, scoured right down to its mineral shell. On the doorstep of our hiding place lies an open refrigerator, doubtless abandoned by those who fled the shooting. The wrapping on a large pack of milk shows the use-by date: a surreal piece of information, the milk is good until tomorrow…

We have just been taking part in long and fruitless negotiations with the members of Manifesto, one of the innumerable opposition forces, locked in combat with the very weak “strong man” of the regime, President Syad Barré, once a friend of the USSR, then its enemy, and now an old man shut away within the fortress of the Villa Somalia. His opponents have already formed themselves into a government, and while making speeches about the future of the country, these gentlemen are squabbling over the ministerial portfolios they count on obtaining after the overthrow of Barré. They are ready to form alliances with anyone at all – the USSR, America, the devil – in fact, with whoever will supply the most arms and money in the shortest possible time. They are hesitant and lack ruthlessness. One cannot count on them. Soon the real warlords will arrive, who will have none of their reservations. Furthermore, it is clear that the Moscow analysts have as poor an understanding of this country as the American strategists. But the salient point is that there is less and less for the experts in history to understand. For this city’s only history is mere survival, the phases of it are recorded in corpses: these two bodies, among others, a few yards from our refuge, two youths, probably the ones who had to abandon the fridge and run, and fell beneath a burst of gunfire. And the chronology of this history gone mad is documented in the use-by date on a pack of milk swollen by the heat.

We are waiting for nightfall to be able to leave the area. The fighters will be active for another half hour, shooting, killing, stocking up their reserves of food. Then they will go back to their quarters, as they do every day, to lose themselves, some in the thirst-provoking nirvana of khat, some in the caresses of a female companion in arms. The city, dark, without water, without links to the outside world, will become a dot in space amid the stars.

The woman Elias begins to talk about is not at all like the present-day Anna I had imagined through my half-slumber in the plane. Instead, she is thinner and weary, and when she stands against the light beside the window her pale face blends with the silvery swirling of the snowflakes outside the glass. At first, like a clockwork toy animated by the last few turns of the key, she played the part of a worldly Muscovite woman, a diplomats wife showing a friend round her luxurious apartment. But within a few minutes the clockwork runs down, comes to a standstill. “There came a time when we’d had enough of all those African bits and pieces. Besides, its better like this. With all the masks they make for the tourists, there soon won’t be any forests left…” The clockwork within her comes to life in one last spasm, just to say that, unlike other diplomats wives, she has a job and that at the embassy they have entrusted her with work on data processing… They smile at one another, aware of the futility of the roles they are trying to play: she, a modern woman who has achieved a brilliant international career, he, a champion of human rights who braves all dangers (in the falseness of those first few minutes he had spoken briefly about the battle at Mavinga, where he was wounded. What an idiot!).

They fall silent, observe the fluttering of white above the bare trees in the courtyard. He is aware of the slender-ness of Anna’s hand in his own. She begins speaking without turning her head toward him.

“I’ve lived a life – in fact, I constructed it, this life – which I should not have lived. And yet, you see, I feel I absolutely had to live through it, such as it was, this life, to be capable of denying it. A lot of people can probably judge their lives like this. But the difference is that you and I love one another…”

The snow tumbles even more heavily out of the darkening air. Elias draws a breath, preparing to reply, but suddenly a toy standing on the television set comes to life: a plastic crocodile that opens its jaws, moves its feet, and emits a growl with a jazzy tune. “It’s my son’s clock. That means it s time for the television news…” They both laugh softly and wait for the reptile to finish its performance. Anna goes on talking, but in a voice as if liberated, less cautious.

“You told me one day that the world must be changed. Because it was intolerable for a soldier to smash a woman’s collarbone with a kick of his boot. But you haven’t really succeeded in changing it, this world…”

“I’d have hated myself if I hadn’t fought to do so…”

“If you’d married me, you wouldn’t have had time to fight, admit it.”

“Even yesterday I should have replied: wrong, of course I would! But I don’t want to lie anymore. If I’d married you, I’d have become a fat Angolan apparatchik who’d spend his time opening accounts in the West and counting everything in barrels and carats… And I’d have looked like… Yes, that crocodile. But less fun.”

She seems not to have heard his joking remark.

“In the end this was the thought that kept me alive. I said to myself: Very well, I’m living with a man I don’t love. The years go by, and it will always be like this. Till I die. And then I remembered that woman they laid on the ground in front of her child, and the child sees his mother’s collarbone is broken… And then I said to myself that the only way to love you was to let you fight against that world. I suffered a lot but I believed I was doing the right thing. And now it’s too late. We can’t go back anymore…”