Andrei Makine - Once Upon The River Love

The candle flame was flagging, flickering; the storm rattled noisily in the chimney; the fire, revived, embalmed the darkness with warm, penetrating odors. My drunkenness detached this moment from what had gone before. The red-haired woman's izba became my rediscovered home. And this woman sitting beside me was someone close to me, whose absence, from now on, I would be aware of.

When there were no more photos, the woman tried to smile at me through the mist of her tears. Closing her eyes, she leaned toward me. With a tentative hand, I touched her shoulder. Everything was mixed up in my wine-soaked young head. The woman was this body and this stormy night and this moment with the smell of the fire… and this rediscovered being. I wanted to cling to her, to live in the shade of her body, by the rhythm of her silent sighs. Not to depart from this moment.

She touched my forehead with her chin. My hands brushed against the collar of her blouse, touched her breasts. I closed my eyes…

She pushed me away violently. On the wall I saw the rapid swing of a shadow. My head was shaken by two resounding slaps. I came to my senses.

She was standing up, her face closed, hard.

"I… What…?" I stammered, completely lost.

"Beat it, quick, you dirty little shit!" she said in a weary, disgusted voice.

And in one armful she threw my clothes at me.

If I did not hurl myself into the white abyss right away, it is because when I reached the crown of the bridge I became aware that there was no longer any me. There was no longer a person to be hurled into the icy river.

There was certainly a ghost from before – that adolescent who would avidly seize on any tale of love; that spy on sexual confidences let fall by the hulking great loggers in the workers' canteen. An unrecognizable ghost.

And there was that other one who, a few moments before, was thrashing around between the thighs of an unknown woman, his eyes fixed on her face with the pitiless light beating down on it. That one, too, was a stranger.

As for the one who had just been exploring old photos, this was a being I had never encountered within me…

I found myself on the bridge with several scraps of myself being scattered into the snow-lashed darkness. The wind was so violent that it seemed to empty my body of all the warmth from my short sheepskin coat. I could no longer feel my lips, or my cheeks, now covered with a layer of crystals. I no longer existed.

Unhappiness and madness have their own logic too…

It was in accordance with this logic that the bridge suddenly lit up. The headlights of a truck, late, untimely, fortuitous, crazy. The driver should have crossed the bridge at full speed and disappeared in pursuit of his own obscure goal. But he braked abruptly. For – that was it – he had no goal. Other than this absurd race through the storm. Quite simply he was drunk. Drunk and sad. Like the brawl he had just been involved in on the steps of the liquor store under a dim streetlamp. The light had gone out, and he could not even hit the man who had cut his cheek with a fragment of bottle glass. Cursing, they had gone their ways into the darkness…

Now it was vital not to stop. The two patches of yellow from the headlights were the only source of light, the throbbing of the engine was the only reservoir of warmth. Yes, his drunken heartbeats and that engine. Despite the snow, the whole universe was black.

And if he stopped suddenly on the crown of the bridge, it was because he must have detected the presence of a tiny parcel of life in this icy pass. He saw a shadowy figure transfixed behind the parapet, clinging to the cast-iron railing. A shadowy figure that seemed to be waiting for the ultimate extinction of its last spark. When the numbed fingers let go…

Or maybe, quite simply, he saw this solitary silhouette and his cloudy brain imagined a woman. One he could accost and cheer up with whatever was left of the vodka in the bottle he kept hidden behind the seat. Some desperate girl whose whole life had been rather like this teetering on the parapet of a bridge at night. A crumpled body he could lay down on the narrow bench behind the seats. A woman he could "have."

Or maybe he guessed what kind of shadowy figure it was; and felt bad about his own thoughts; and would even have had pity on that frozen girl he wanted to drag into his cabin.

Maybe… Who knows what went on inside the head of a drunken Siberian truckdriver, a big, rough man, his forearms covered by tattoos (anchors, crosses on a tombstone, women with big breasts), with one cheek covered in dried blood, and sad gray eyes that were forced to peer out through a fog of drunkenness?

He saw a shadowy figure, thought of an easy body stretched out on the bench, felt a pleasant heaviness at the base of his stomach. And he was angry; the whole of life is governed by this heaviness. Food, woman, blood!

He braked and jumped down into the snow, slamming the door. Rubbing his cheek with a ball of ice scooped up from the slatted side of the truck, he walked toward the shadowy figure. You could no longer see anything three yards ahead. The waves of snow were so dense that you would have thought the earth itself was rocking and tipping into the Olyei.

The figure stood behind the parapet, above the white abyss of the river. The driver tapped it on the shoulder. Then he cast a look down below. His eyes opened wide. It was the void: the invisible frontier of a vertiginous beyond. He grabbed the collar of the snow-covered sheepskin coat and pulled the figure over the parapet.

"What the hell are you doing there?" he demanded, dragging his burden toward the truck. "Where'd you get pissed like that, idiot? Why, at your age I was sweating my guts out in the factory! And today all these kids can think about is getting pissed out of their skulls."

The shadowy figure made no reply. In any case the truckdriver was really asking himself these questions, while thinking about something quite different. About that nameless abyss, about the solitude he had just encountered in the night, about the fine trickle of warmth the frozen ghost was still giving off.

He went on talking in the same way in the cabin. The storm wind had woken him up, had made him garrulous. These snatches of nighttime conversation were the first things I was aware of when, slowly, I began to reinhabit the inanimate ghost shaken by the jolting of the road.

I was warming up, becoming myself again. I needed to assume my new identity. The unrecognizable strangers were once again assembling within me: the virgin of a few days ago who spied on adult confidences; the young frenzied body ripping the belly of a prostitute with his sex; and the figure in the storm, waiting to take the final step, waiting for his numbed fingers to give way… All this was me!

The man asked where I lived and read my reply in the quivering of my lips, which I could still hardly control. I stared at him. His face swollen from the cold, the alcohol, and the blows he had just received. His broad, hairy wrists. His hands covered in shiny scars, his thick fingers with their broad, hardened nails…

And without being able to reach the logical conclusion of my thought, I was feeling: Now I am like him; yes, I am in the same boat he is; in his skin, pretty much. Instead of the immense joy that, for years, I expected at this turning point of my life, a cruel despair! Like him… Soon the same tattooed hands on the steering wheel of a heavy truck, the same face, the same smell of vodka. But above all the same experience with women. I gave a sidelong glance at his heavy legs and imagined the force with which they would part a woman's thighs. The thighs of a woman… Of the red-haired woman! I felt something tremble inside me: of course he had "had" her. Before me…

"So what are you gawking at me like that for?" he muttered, noticing how intently I was staring at him. "One thing's for sure: we can't go any faster. Have you seen the road?"