Andreï Makine: Human Love

The violence of the voices flayed by despair, the movement of shadows through the tangle of bodies, two laments intermingled, that of a mother and of her child. And that woman still scraping at the decks dirty surface. Slowly she draws closer to the place where we threw down our gear…

The sound erupts suddenly. Powerfully vibrant organ music, interwoven with violins. The woman must have turned up the volume of the tape recorder Leonid left beside our bags. She did it with the same action as her scraping, turning it up fully. Consciously or not? With the inspired awareness of madness, let us say. For only this tragic and triumphant thunder is capable of cutting through the madness that has taken hold of the boat. People freeze. Voices fall silent. The heady outburst of organ music protects the boats solitude.

Elias’s body disappears slowly. The water is so calm that this human shape looks as if it were rising amid the stars, into a sky deeper than the sky.

When the music stops, very clearly, amid absolute silence, a child’s sigh can be heard.

ANDREÏ MAKINE was born in Siberia in 1957, and has lived in France since 1987. His fourth novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers (Le testament français), won both of France’s top literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis. His work has been translated into more than forty languages.

GEOFFREY STRACHAN was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize for his translation of Le testament français in 1998. He has translated all of Andreï Makine’s novels for publication in Britain and the United States.