Andrei Makine - Once Upon The River Love

As we were leaving after the performance we heard a voice in the crowd: "On Saturday they're showing it for the last time. Then that's it. Shall we come on Saturday?"

We stopped dead, all three of us, stunned. The cinema building, the trampled snow the black sky – suddenly everything seemed as if it had been turned upside down. Speechless, we rushed up to the great billboard, a canvas rectangle four yards by two, showing our hero's face surrounded by women, palm trees, and helicopters. Our eyes locked on the fateful date:

MUST END MARCH 19

When Utkin's grandfather saw our faces, his eyebrows shot up. "What's the matter with you?" he asked. "Have they finally killed off your Belmondo, is that it?"

We did not know what to say. Even in this great hospitable izba where one day the Western World had been born, we felt abandoned.

But life is like that: what we passionately desire often arrives in the guise of what we most dread.

On the day of our final rendezvous with Belmondo, March 19, the day that was going to mark a real end of the world, we saw a new poster! Both different from the previous one and similar, because animated by the brilliant smile and the sparkling eyes that we recognized from a long way off. And the painter must have been perfecting his art – Belmondo looked more alive, more relaxed. This time the shining face was surrounded by animals: gorillas, elephants, tigers…

First there was an explosion of wild joy: It's him, he is returning! Then a covert anxiety began to overtake us, a doubt began to gnaw at our fervent hearts: Would he be true to himself? True to us?

Yes, at first this new Belmondo struck us as a brazen impostor, like one of the false czars that Russian history is studded with. Like the false Dmitri or the false Peter III our history teacher had been telling us about… Our unease could not be shaken off. That seventeenth showing was to be one of great apprehension.

All through the film we were unconsciously waiting for a gesture from him, a wink. Or a prearranged remark that would have reassured us by testifying to the authenticity of the next film. We focused on him especially in the last scene: now he appears on the balcony, he smiles, he throws down the pages of the typescript… That was where we were hoping for a bridge, a link!

But Belmondo, his left hand resting on the waist of his lovely neighbor, now won over, remained imperturbable. He seemed to be calmly enjoying the suspense, which for us was real torture.

Coming out afterward, we looked again at the poster. Our hero's face, re-created with paint that was too fresh, too vivid, seemed to us artificial. For a long time we stared questioningly at his expression, by the pale light of a nocturnal streetlamp. Its mystery disturbed us…

On the day of the new film we remained silent throughout the journey. Without discussing it, we did not make our usual stopover to eat. Our hearts were not in it. And besides, the weather was not suitable. The frozen fog clung to our faces, stifled our rare words, obliterated the landmarks that guided us. Each of us felt the others to be tense, nervous.

In a little thicket at the edge of the city we took off our snow-shoes and hid them, as usual. We did not want to look like villagers. Above all, not in front of Belmondo.

It felt as if we had been waiting a good hour before the lights went down. And as for the newsreel, this time it seemed to last an eternity. We saw a cosmonaut, who looked like a phosphorescent ghost, swimming around his spacecraft with the slow movements of a sleepwalker. We felt we could hear the bottomless silence of space, which surrounded him. But the voice-over, in no way daunted by cosmic hush, announced with vibrant rhetoric: "Today, as all our people and all progressive humanity on the planet prepare to celebrate the one hundred and third birthday of the great Lenin, our cosmonauts, by taking this important step in the exploration of space, offer yet another infallible proof of the universal correctness of the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism…"

The voice went rumbling on in the infinite depths of the cosmos, while the shining phantom attached to the craft prepared to reenter the capsule. He advanced toward the door, which opened inch by inch with appalling slowness, just as if it were sinking into glutinous jelly in a nightmare. It was then that we became aware that we were not the only ones feverishly awaiting the new Belmondo. When the sleepwalking cosmonaut began to thrust his head through the door of the spacecraft and the commentary declared that this excursion into space demonstrated the incontestable superiority of socialism, we heard the furious exclamation of one irritated spectator: "For God's sake! Get on with it! Get back in!"

No, we were not alone in fearing the fraud of a false Belmondo. The whole audience at the Red October cinema was anxious about being betrayed…

From the first moments of the film, everyone forgot these doubts… His muscles stretched to the full, our hero was scaling the wall of a burning apartment building. At every moment, long flames risked setting fire to his black silk cape. And right at the top, on a narrow ledge, the heroine was uttering moans of distress, raising her eyes to heaven, ready to faint…

The hundred and third birthday, the excursion into space of the sleepwalking cosmonaut, the universal correctness of the doctrine – all that was instantly wiped out. The room froze: would he succeed in snatching the swooning beauty from the flames?

This was Belmondo, all right!

When the tension was at its height, when the whole of the Red October was breathing in time with the pace of the intrepid climb, when everyone's fingers were clinging to the armrests of the seats, in imitation of the fingers gripping the ledge on the top story, when Belmondo was hanging on thanks only to the magnetism of our gaze, the incredible occurred…

The camera performed a giddy zigzag, and we saw the apartment building stretched out flat on the floor of a film set. And Belmondo standing up, dusting off his cape… A director was haranguing him over some carelessness in his performance. His climb was just a trick! He had been crawling horizontally along a model where the windows were belching forth carefully controlled flames.

So everything was false! But he, he was more real than ever. He had admitted us into the cinema's holy of holies, its very kitchen, and allowed us to see the magic from the other side. So there were no limits to his confidence in us!

What this apartment building laid out on the ground represented was, in fact, the link we had dreamed of, a bit like the spy in the can of fish soup. A link to a world more real than that of the hundred and third birthday and the universal doctrines.

And as initiates into the ways of the West, we now followed Belmondo in his new adventure. Stepping over the windows and walls of the blazing apartment building, he walked out of the film studio.

We rediscovered the West. A world where people lived without worrying about the somber shadows cast by the sunlit mountain-tops. A world of deeds for the sake of the grand gesture. A world where bodies gloried in the power of their own carnal beauty. A world one could take seriously because it was not afraid to show its comic side.

But above all its language! It was a world where anything could be said. Where a word could be found for the most confused, the most murky reality: lover, rival, mistress, desire, affair… The amorphous, nameless reality that surrounded us began to structure itself, to classify itself, to reveal its logic. The Western World could read itself!

And, infatuated, we began to spell out the words of this fantastic universe…

This time Belmondo was a stuntman. Though still halfway illiterate in the language of the West, we nevertheless sensed in this role a powerful, stylish figure. A stuntman! A hero whose courage would always be attributed to someone else. Condemned always to remain in the shadows. To withdraw from the performance at the very moment when the heroine should be rewarding his bravery. Alas! The kiss was placed on the lips of his fortunate double, who had done nothing to deserve it…