Andrei Makine - Dreams Of My Russian Summers

"They are great, all these bulwarks!" I exclaimed, using a word whose maritime application was only vaguely known to me.

Pashka gave me a rather confused glance. I got up, in a hurry to return to the Mountain of Joy… But my friend tugged me forcefully by the sleeve to make me sit down and announced in a nervous whisper, "Hang on! They're coming!"

I heard the sound of footsteps, the click of heels on the wet clay of the bank, then a tattoo on the wood of a footbridge. Finally a metallic hammering right above us on the deck of the barge… And already muffled voices reaching to us from its bowels.

Pashka stood up straight and pressed himself against the side of the barge. It was only then that I noticed the three portholes. Their panes were broken and blocked up from the inside with pieces of plywood. The surfaces of these were covered in fine holes made by a knife blade. Without leaving his porthole, my friend gestured with his hand, inviting me to imitate him. Clinging onto a steel projection that ran the length of the side, I glued myself to the left-hand porthole. The one in the center remained unoccupied.

What I saw through the crack was at the same time banal and extraordinary. A woman, of whom I could only see her head in profile and the upper part of her body, seemed to be leaning with her elbows on a table, her arms parallel, her hands motionless. Her face appeared calm and even drowsy. Only her presence here, on this barge, seemed surprising. Although after all… She kept gently nodding her head, which had fair, curly hair, as if she were continually agreeing with an invisible speaker.

I moved away from my porthole and glanced at Pashka. I was perplexed. "But after all, what's there to see?" But he had his palms stuck to the flaking surface of the barge, and his forehead against the plywood.

Then I moved to the neighboring porthole, peering into one of the cracks that perforated the wood that blocked it.

It was as if our boat were sinking, going to the bottom of that cluttered canal, and the side of the barge, on the other hand, were hurtling up toward the sky. Feverishly I let myself be magnetized by its rough metal, while trying to keep within my sight the vision that had just blinded me.

It was a woman's buttocks, white, nude, massive. Yes, the haunches of a kneeling woman, still seen in profile, her legs, her thighs, the breadth of which terrified me; and the start of her back, cut off by the field of vision allowed by the crack. Behind that enormous backside there was a soldier, also on his knees, his trousers unbuttoned, his tunic in disorder. He was grasping the hips of the woman and drawing them toward him, as if he wanted to be swallowed up into that mass of flesh, which at the same time he kept thrusting away from him with violent shudders of his whole body.

Our boat began to slip away beneath my feet. A vessel sailing up the Volga had sent its waves into our channel. One of them managed to unbalance me. In saving myself from falling I took a step to the left and found myself by the first porthole. I pressed my forehead against its steel frame. In the crack appeared the woman with curly hair and an indifferent and somnolent face, the one I had seen at first; leaning on what resembled a tablecloth, dressed in a white blouse, she continued acquiescing with little nods of her head and was distractedly examining her fingers…

This first porthole. And the second. The woman whose eyelids were heavy with sleep, her dress and her hairstyle very ordinary. And the other. This naked, erect backside; this white flesh into which there plunged a man who seemed slender beside her; those broad thighs; that heavy movement of the hips. In my shocked young head no link could associate these two images. Impossible to join this upper half of a woman's body to that lower half!

My excitement was such that the side of the barge suddenly seemed to me to be stretched out horizontally Lying flat on the surface like a lizard, I moved toward the porthole with the naked woman. She was still there, but the powerful curve of her flesh was now motionless. The soldier, now facing me, was buttoning himself up with limp and clumsy movements. And another one, smaller than the first, was kneeling down beside the white backside. His movements, on the other hand, were of a nervous and fearful rapidity. But as soon as he began wrestling, pushing the heavy white hemispheres with his belly, you could not have told him apart from the first one. There was no difference in their actions.

My eyes were already filling with black needles. My legs were giving way And my heart, pressed against the rusty metal, was making the whole vessel vibrate with its deep, breathless echoes. A new series of little waves shook the boat. The side of the barge became vertical again, and, losing my lizard's agility, I slid toward the first porthole. The woman in the white blouse was nodding her head mechanically while examining her hands. I saw her scratching one nail with another, to remove the layer of varnish…

Their footsteps resounded in reverse order this time: the hammering of the heels on the deck; the tattoo on the planks of the footbridge; the slapping of the wet clay. Without looking at me, Pashka stepped over the side of our boat, bounded onto a half-submerged pontoon, then onto a landing stage. I followed him, jumping limply like a rag doll on strings.

Reaching the bank, he sat down, removed his shoes, rolled up his trousers to the knees, and walked into the water, parting the long stems of the reeds. He thrust aside the duckweed and splashed water over his face for a long time, uttering groans of pleasure, which in the distance could have been taken for cries of distress.

It was a great day in her life. On that June evening she was, for the first time in her life, going to give herself to one of her young friends, to one of those dancers who shuffled on the dance floor at the Mountain of Joy.

She was rather frail. Her face had the neutral features that pass unnoticed in the crowd. The color of her pale russet hair could only be detected by daylight. Under the floodlights of the Mountain or in the bluish glow of the street lamps she appeared simply blond.

I had discovered this erotic custom just a few days ago. In the human swarm at the dance floor I saw groups forming – a swirling knot of adolescents came together, wriggling, getting excited, and as they left, they would scatter to be initiated into what sometimes seemed to me stupidly simple, sometimes fabulously mysterious and profound: love.

She must have been passed over in one of those groups. Like the others, she had been secretly drinking among the bushes that covered the slopes of the Mountain. Then, when their excited little circle had exploded into couples, she was left alone: the accidents of arithmetic did not provide her with a partner. The couples had vanished. Drunkenness was already overtaking her. She was not used to alcohol and had drunk too much, out of eagerness, out of fear of not matching up to the others, and also from the desire to overcome her nervousness on this great day… She had come back onto the floor, not knowing what to do with her body now, every fiber of which was filled with impatient excitement. But already they were beginning to switch off the floodlights.

All this I was to guess later… That night I simply saw a girl pacing up and down in a corner of the park at night, walking round the wan pool of light from a street lamp. Like a moth held prisoner by a ray of light. Her gait surprised me. She moved forward as if on a tightrope, with steps that were at once floating and tense. I could see that in every one of her movements she was struggling against drunkenness. Her face had a fixed expression. Her whole being was mobilized in this single effort – not to fall over, to let nothing be suspected, to continue walking round on this circle of light until the black trees stopped swaying and leaping when she approached them, waving their noisy branches.