Andrei Makine - Once Upon The River Love

The night air, filled with the titillating smell of the storm, penetrated our sleeping coach. It was the freshness of the first breath of air that the traveler inhales as he steps down from the train, at night, in an unknown station where a woman waits for him…

One night we stumbled onto a brand-new train…

Yes, the coaches had not so far had passengers in them. The green paint was smooth and shining, and the enamel plaques sparkled like white china. The windows, perfectly transparent, seemed to reveal a deeper, more tempting interior. And this interior, with its smell of the virgin imitation leather of the berths, concentrated within itself the very quintessence of train journeys. Their spirit. Their soul. Their voluptuousness.

That evening Samurai did not light the stove. From his knapsack he took out a strange flat bottle and shone a flashlight on it. Then, setting an aluminum cup on the table, he poured himself several drops of a thick, brownish liquid and drank slowly, as if he wanted to appreciate fully its flavor.

"So what's that?" we asked, curious.

"It's a lot better than tea, believe me," he replied, smiling mysteriously. "Do you want a taste?"

"Only if you first say what it is!"

Samurai poured himself some more of the brown liquid and drank it, screwing up his eyes, then announced: "It's liqueur from the Kharg root. You remember? The one Utkin unearthed last summer…"

The drink had a flavor we did not manage to identify – or to connect with any dish we had ever tasted. An alcoholic taste that seemed to detach your mouth and your head from the rest of your body. Or rather to fill all the rest with a kind of luminous weightlessness.

"Olga told me," explained Samurai in a voice that was already floating in that aerial lightness. "It's not an aphrodisiac, it's just a euphoriant."

"Afro… what?" I asked, baffled by these unfamiliar syllables.

"Eupho… how much?" said Utkin, wide-eyed.

The very sound of the unknown words had something volatile and hazy about it…

We lay back on our new berths. Our heads were full of the scene from the film that had most fired our imaginations. It slid imperceptibly into our sleep, which was filled with erotic dreams worthy of the Kharg root…

In this scene Belmondo's ravishing companion, clad in a mere shadow of a brassiere and a trace of a G-string, snatched away a tablecloth, causing a huge vase with a sumptuous bouquet to fall from the table. And with wild abandon she proposed to our hero that they celebrate their carnal communion on this level playing field. The hero evaded the extravagant invitation. And we guessed that it was our own modesty he wanted to protect. The mere appearance of this bacchante was already producing very special vibrations within the walls of the Red October. Belmondo must have sensed that if he had given free rein to his desire, revolution would have been imminent in Nerlug. With the storming of the squat militia building and the destruction of the Communard barbed-wire factory. So he declined the proposition. But so as not to compromise his virility in the eyes of his audience, he suggested quite a different erotic battlefield.

"On the table? And why not standing up in a hammock? Or on skis?"

It is the measure of our love and, indeed, our confidence that this hypothesis was taken totally seriously! Yes, we had cast-iron faith in such a purely Western erotic performance. Two tanned bodies upright (!) in a hammock attached to the velvety trunks of palm trees. The thrust of their desire in direct proportion to the ecstatic unsteadiness beneath their feet. And the passion of their embraces increasing the violence of their rocking. Their fusion, in its profundity, would turn heaven and earth upside down. And those tropical night lovers would come to in the hollow of the hammock, in the cradle of love, whose swinging back and forth would gradually slow…

And as for love on skis, we were well equipped to picture the scene. Who better than we, who spent half our lives on snowshoes, could imagine the intense heat that fired up the body after two or three hours in motion? The lovers would cast aside their poles, the track would grow double, and all that could be heard would be the panting breath, the rhythmic crunching of the snow under the skis, and the cackling of an indiscreet magpie on the branch of a cedar tree…

However, we preferred the hammock, as more exotic. That evening we abandoned ourselves to its rocking, as we floated amid the vapors of the root of love. In our sleep we heard the rustling of the long palm leaves; we inhaled the nocturnal breath of the ocean. From time to time an overripe coconut fell onto the sand, a languorous wave spent itself beside our plaited sandals. And the sky, overloaded with tropical constellations, swayed to the rhythm of our desire…

We woke in the night and lay still for a long moment with our eyes open. None of us dared to confess his amazed intuition to the others. It felt as if the rocking of the hammock were continuing. At first we thought it was a train passing alongside our track and shaking us slightly… Finally Utkin, who was installed on the bottom berth, pressed his forehead against the dark window, trying to penetrate the gloom. And we heard his troubled exclamation: "Hey, where's it taking us?"

Our train was traveling at a brisk pace through the taiga. This was no mere shunting operation on the sidings at the station but speedy and regular progress in good earnest. Not the faintest glimmer of light was visible now: nothing but the impenetrable wall of the taiga and a strip of snow beside the track.

Samurai consulted his watch: it was five to two.

"What if we jumped?" I suggested, gripped by panic but already experiencing the surge of an exciting intoxication.

All three of us went toward the exit. Samurai opened the door. It was as if a frozen pine branch had come and lashed our faces, stopping our breath. It was the last cold of winter, its rearguard action. The needles of the wind and the powder snow. The endless darkness of the taiga… Samurai slammed the door.

"To jump out here would be throwing ourselves straight into the wolf's jaws. I bet we've been traveling for at least three hours. And at this speed… I know only one man who could do it," he added.

"Who's that?"

Samurai grinned and winked. "Belmondo!"

We laughed. Our fear faded. We went back to our compartment and decided to get off at the first stop, at the first inhabited place… Utkin took out a compass and, after minute adjustments, announced: "We're traveling east!"

We would have preferred the opposite direction. But did we have a choice?

The rocking of the coach quickly got the better of our heroic resistance to sleep. We all dozed off, picturing the same scene: Belmondo opens the coach's door, inspects the frozen night speeding past in a whirlwind of powder snow, and, stepping onto the footboard, hurls himself into the deep shadows of the taiga…

It was the silence and the perfect immobility that woke us. And also the luminous cold of the morning. We grabbed our shapkas and our bags and hurried toward the exit. But outside the door there was no trace of human habitation or of any human activity. Only the wooded flank of a hill, whose white summit was being slowly suffused with the brightness of the rising sun…

We remained at the open door, sniffing the air. It was not icy and dry, as at Svetlaya. It entered our lungs with a supple, caressing softness. You did not have to warm it in your mouth before inhaling it, like the harsh mouthfuls of wind at home. The snows stretching out before our eyes made us think of a strange permanent mild spell. And the forest climbing up the flank of the hill was also different from our taiga. In the lines of their branches the trees had a somewhat sinuous delicacy, a little mannered. It was as if they had been drawn in Chinese ink on a background of softened snow, by the hazy light of the rising sun. And around their trunks writhed the long snakes of lianas. It was the jungle, the tropical forest, suddenly frozen in snow…